I work in the building design industry and this is a huge problem. Building codes are developed and maintained by private associations of industry professionals (this is a good thing) and then released under copyright (this is a bad thing).
A full set of all applicable building codes for any given structure can easily cost in excess of $1000. These are codes that have been adopted into law by the jurisdiction, but they are not made publicly available as all laws should be.
Many people have noticed this and complained. The NFPA (National Fire Protection Association which maintains, among many others codes, the National Electrical Code) did somewhat acquiesce by release a "free" version of their codes through a crippled Java application intended to disallow any copying. It sort of worked a little, but at some point something changed (Java updated, probably) and I could never get the security settings right to allow it to run again.
The amount of time that could be saved by having an HTML, hyperlinked (practically every section of any code references another section, or a word with a very specific, non-intuitive definition) edition of every building code publicly available would be enormous.
A full set of all applicable building codes for any given structure can easily cost in excess of $1000. These are codes that have been adopted into law by the jurisdiction, but they are not made publicly available as all laws should be.
Many people have noticed this and complained. The NFPA (National Fire Protection Association which maintains, among many others codes, the National Electrical Code) did somewhat acquiesce by release a "free" version of their codes through a crippled Java application intended to disallow any copying. It sort of worked a little, but at some point something changed (Java updated, probably) and I could never get the security settings right to allow it to run again.
The amount of time that could be saved by having an HTML, hyperlinked (practically every section of any code references another section, or a word with a very specific, non-intuitive definition) edition of every building code publicly available would be enormous.