Lack of copyright undercuts funding.
Hickey 23 – Legislative Attorney at the Congressional Research Service, former Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, J.D. from New York University School of Law.
Kevin J. Hickey, “Copyright in Standards Incorporated by Reference into Law and the Pro Codes Act,” Congressional Research Service, 09-26-2023, https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R47656.pdf
On the incentive side, Congress may consider whether judicial decisions—which have recently trended against SDOs’ copyright claims—have undercut SDOs’ ability to fund their operations through publishing and selling their standards. Some may question whether copyright protection for IBR standards is necessary, arguing that SDOs could fund their activities in other ways or combine IBR standards with other material to create an unambiguously copyrightable form of their work. Others, including many SDOs, maintain that copyright is needed for them to recoup the costs of standards creation.143 On that view, uncertainty in current law may undermine SDOs and the social benefits they create for lawmakers, governmental agencies, and the public.