Most countries don’t allow copyrighting standards.
Griffin and Saunders 24 – Senior Vice President and General Counsel at the American National Standards Institute, J.D. from Albany Law School; Senior Vice President of Public Policy at the American National Standards Institute.
Patricia A. Griffin and Maury Saunders, “ANSI Publishes Action Brief on IBR Landscape for SDOs,” American National Standards Institute, 05-09-2024, https://www.ansi.org/standards-news/all-news/2024/05/5-9-24-ansi-publishes-action-brief-on-ibr-landscape-for-sdos
Global Trends in IBR
Finding exceptions to copyright protection on IBR’d standards is gaining acceptance globally.
PublicResource.Org, the principal plaintiff in many of these cases (including the U.S.-based, ASTM case previously mentioned), is winning cases in many jurisdictions.
In a decision released earlier this year, the EU Court of Justice similarly found that certain European Harmonised Technical Standards must be freely available without charge because of the overriding public interest in the law justifying disclosure of those standards.