Petition - Australian Standards Should be FREE

If you think the Australian Standards should be FREE then please sign this petition. Currently you have to pay many hundred of dollars to a foreign company to buy these standards if you are working on project that requires them.

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#ElectronicsCreators #petition #australia

[telazed]

Totally agree. I used to work for a branch within a major standardization organization in Europe and can just say that you fully express what I am advocating since years. Standards should be based on the grounds "public money = public access". (Edit: Typo)

[simonrichards]

Totally agree. It's the same in the UK - standards that are required by law are inexplicably behind a paywall. If that's not a racket I don't know what is.

[jwflame]

Same in the UK, and even if you pay for expensive standards from BSI which typically are £100s each, they come with crippling DRM which means to even view what you have paid for, you must install the FileOpen plugin. That is basically spyware which will record everything you do with it, including what pages were viewed, how many times, whether you attempted to print parts of it and so on. Permission to view, print or do anything else can be revoked at any time even after you have paid. FileOpen also ties you to exclusively using Adobe products to view the crippled PDFs, and is only available on some versions of some operating systems.

[peterkutas]

I concur; you're expected to comply with the 'standards', then the standards should be freely available so you are aware of what they are...

[simonalterator]

Had this exact issue a couple of months ago. A seemingly simple design project ended up bumping into four standards, each costing >$200. Figured a public library would have them - nope. The librarian said they’d looked into it and would have to fork out a licensing fee for each person who wanted to borrow them. Completely infuriating!

One of the ideas that underpins the ‘rule of law’ is that laws are openly available to the public. Now there’s an argument to be made that legislation and standards aren’t strictly ’laws’, but if you’re breaking the law by not following them I feel like it’s splitting hairs. Hiding standards behind paywalls is not compatible with the rule of law imho and the need to be made freely available to make them fair.

[stevegraham]

As an ordinary Electrician there is about 14-18 Standards we need to work to. 14 according to Master Electricans Association, and 18 according to National Electrical Contractors Association. The small business associations a lot of Sparkies join.
As an Electrician in Domestic, Commercial, Industrial, Factories, Coal, Hard Rock Mines and Quarries, Instrumentation, High Voltage, Dust and Gas Hazardous Areas, Data and Comms, Air Con and Refridgertion, among other areas, there is about 120 Standards I need be have intimate knowledge of. Plus QA/QC, Safety, Contract, and other Management systems.
An Electrical Engineer / Designer I know has to be across 180.
And just to give another example, it takes 270 Standards to build a house.
And don't forget, we also have to have access to all of the previous Standards to make sure something completed earlier complied with those earlier versions.

[Jamesforf]

Since you guys implement standards in law, Australians should be able to access the standard for free. Japan implement standards in law and are free to the Japanese public.

[bertieblob]

ALL standards should be freely available. Try getting your hands on JTAG specs and others.

[WizardTim]

Yes! Absolutely the PDFs should be accessible to everyone at no charge! The only reason I have access to standards is because I'm associated with a university that pays for it (but not all), the average engineer or even informed consumer has no chance of getting access to those standards and no chance of knowing if their thing is compliant. To me it's the same as if the government said I have to pay to view legislation to know if I'm breaking one of the many thousands of laws.

I'm currently working on a YouTube video about USB charger safety in Australia from an eCommerce platform and I wanted to compare the products I bought to the standards AS/NZS 62368.1 and 60950.1, this would cost me AU$1, 040.68! And of course the only thing I can do is read them, I can't show the non-compliant charger and point to the part in the standard it's violating as that would be illegal distribution of the copyrighted standard! Everyone just has to be in the dark about what the standards say!

To put it bluntly "closed standards cause confusion, poor compliance, reduced economic productivity and at worst SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH".

[sharpbends]

Totally yes, all standards should be completely free.

[shazam]

Several Decades ago, I was the chairman of an ANSI group (American National Standards Institute) and worked on developing an industry requested testing standard for over 2years. I did all the work, correspondence, organization and management of many meetings, documentation and recordkeeping. Provided many thousands in expenses and time for free as a volunteer. It was completed, voted-on, approved and published by ANSI, who sent me a nice "boilerplate" thank you letter. I asked if I could get two or three of the published standard for my files and as a memento. I received a form letter explaining that I could order the standard at $135 each and reminded that they were now copyrighted by ANSI !! As they say: "No good deed goes unpunished". 🙁

[Graham_Wideman]

Hoo boy -- Dave's hit a real stinker with this topic! If it wasn't bad enough that the standards docs (eg: IEC, ANSI etc 60xxx series) are utterly exorbitant prices -- $100's for individual standards and $1000's for multi-part standards -- but you generally can't find out their scope until you buy the darn things, and then discover they reference umpteen other ones. In fact, the seeming complete absence of a master standards navigation mechanism is probably the greatest shortcoming.

And to add insult to injury, the actual formats they're available in are almost unusable -- mostly PDFs licensed to an individual user on a single computer, with extremely restrictive DRM that prevents copying the doc, but also prevents printing, or copy-and-pasting excerpts, or taking screenshots, or even opening the doc on that single computer over remote desktop. So they are basically only amenable to visual reading, in person, on that computer. Surely the whole point of these standards is to promulgate widespread conformance in accordance with them? How are you supposed to actually institute action based on these standards? The DRM goes out of its way to prevent you from actually using standards details and incorporating them into your company's or project's requirements to robustly show provenance back to the standards. As in "Standard ABC says [excerpt] implying we need X voltage withstand in this area, and standard DEF says [excerpt], showing that to implement X withstand we need Y clearance."

It's as though the publishers have done the bare minimum to capture and "publish" the output of standards committees, with no thought to curation and overview, and then done the maximum to encrust these docs with legal and practical encumbrances that support extortionate pricing, whose total effect is to almost completely defeat the standards' stated purpose, and bury the earnest and diligent efforts of the standards committees and contributors who research and produce the actual content.

[paulcleary]

To add insult to injury, 18 electrical standards are free with your license renewal in New Zealand AS/NZS3000:2018 included. Also, just imagine how many subscriptions to the Chinese owned SAI Global are required for every council, water board, electricity distribution company, state government, federal government department, from importers to civil aviation. There would be thousands all paying the same tax payer dollars to China to access our own standards

[donnymac]

Estonian Center for Standardization and Accreditation sells International standards for a lot less than most other providers. You might not find AS standards but will find their IEC and EN equivalents for most standards.

[stuartcoyle]

Signed. I've been burned too many times needing to reference a standard.

[TheLuizfrds]

Would love to see this happening in others places in the world. The initiative is incredible.

[Leo]

Any standard that's legally required must(should) be free to access. Also ones that improve safety should be free too.

[chrisellicott]

Standards Australia was OK before the economic rationalistas got a hold of it. Any standard invoked by legislation should have adequate public access, say through public and educational libraries.

[PearceYT]

In Canada we have to pay as well, these standards are the law. You are expected to follow the law, you should not have to pay to be able to access laws that if not followed can have major consequences. I under stand paying for paper copies but all laws should be accessible by the people. These standards are usually partially funded by tax dollars as well.

[stefansweerts]

A standard can only be a standard if everybody can follow and check them. What means that everybody must have an reasonable way off obtaining them.