Groups will ignore their copyright.
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
When technical standards become incorporated into the law, however, maintaining copyright protection on them may raise a “serious constitutional concern” about public access to the law.13 Various public-access and government-transparency organizations—such as Public.Resource.Org, Inc. (PRO)—have disregarded SDOs’ copyright assertions and posted technical standards for free online.14 These groups argue that IBR standards lose copyright protection once they are incorporated into law, or that their activities are a permitted fair use of SDOs’ copyrighted material.15 Citing both old and recent Supreme Court case law,16 public-access groups argue that because all citizens are entitled to freely access and debate the law under the Constitution’s Due Process Clause and the First Amendment,17 access to it cannot be conditioned on the consent of a copyright holder (here, the SDO). Several copyright disputes between SDOs and public-access organizations have led to protracted litigation.18