On the Cost of IEEE and ISO Standards Documents?

jeffmock asks: "It seems that I bump against this problem a couple of times a year. Last year I was working on an MP3 project and I needed to read the spec for MPEG-I layer-3 audio. The document is ISO 13818-3 and it costs $150 to get a third generation, barely readable photocopy. It's not a freely available document. This week I want to read the 802.11 spec. You can purchase a hard copy from the IEEE for $288 or they will let you download a PDF file for $432. Is this right? I understand the need to fund standards efforts and limit the circulation of drafts while they're a work in progress. Does it make sense to put up this kind of financial barrier for established industry standards?"

Charging for downloading standards docs is idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

... but the standards folks have to be funded one way or another.

But if only big businesses fund standards, it works like big businesses funding elections.

And the solution is in the hands of our elected officials ;-/

Ok, let's be reasonable. Good standards benefit everyone using the standardized goods or processes, and everyone else indirectly. How to spread the costs and prevent welfare abuse?

• Fund with general taxes, like any public investment.
• Fund with specific sales/VAT/excise tax on goods/services embodying standards.
• Fund with 1% of military spending on MIL-spec activity. (OT-BTW, 1% of whole world total military budget could fund one hell of a fine world diplomatic corps, with plenty of people actually understanding and respecting each others' languages and cultures. Slogan: 1% for peace)

Too specific a tax becomes expensive to collect, and you spend more money collecting than provided to the end standards activity. Too general, and you have to justify it as beneficial to everyone (which I think can be done for standards).

Perhaps someone on the right committee in congress could slip in a rider giving the Library of Congress sufficient funds to buy the right to publish standards, which they could then provide for free downloading. Businesses would probably start competing to give standards to the LOC, if it became the prime portal for standards distribution.

Re:Charging for downloading standards docs is idio

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops, I recognize that standards activity is a world wide process. Is there a LOW (Library of the World) somewhere that could do this, and an XRS (external revenue service) that could collect funds to allocate?

Anyway, the W3 seems to be doing good things, and MIT seems to have a good attitude (cf recent announcement re course work materials), and good influence. Maybe they can shame the a-retentives into exercising some imagination.

Linux Developers?

[dfelznic]

I ran into this problem the other day. Who pays for linux kernel developers to get these? I gues now redhat or VA or some other company might pay for some acces to them. But before the influx of corporate money how did linux developers get these specs?

Sounds like a job for ...

[akb]

... freenet.

Blue Book

[heliocentric]

I've made an attempt recently to try and find the so-called blue book standards for a friend of mine who wishes to deeply know the inner workings of "enhanced" CDs. Does anyone know if this same type of obsticle ($$) faces him?

Become a member

[sabaco]

You might want to become a member of the IEEE and the IEEE Standards Association. While you do have to pay every year, you then get to take advantage of member discounts for many sections including ordering the standards documents, and you get discounts at some conferences, too. Also, you get the opportunity to participate in balloting on new standards. Keep in mind that balloting requires that you be responsible and that it is currently done on paper not electronically.

Standards document standards...

[kchayer]

Hmm, I wonder:

Is there a standard for standards document standards that these people should follow as standard? If not, maybe they need to standardize...

:-)

"I say consider this day seized!" -Hobbes

Re:ISO standards documents

[ledbetter]

It would seem to me that the additional cost of a PDF document is that it is more easily used for further reproduction of the document. With one PDF file and a good laser printer you could make unlimited first generation copies. This is less of a risk if they give you a paper copy (especially if it's not of the utmost quality)

Free at Unis

[netsharc]

A friend of mine told me that computers at my uni [uni-karlsruhe.de] library, or even the whole uni domain, can get access to the standars for free.. I can't confirm that, but of course he had in front of him a thick bundle of papers entitled "802.11". Yes it was the ISO standard. Is this the same in universities elsewhere? Well, they even give every student about 1000 sheets free for printing from the uni printer every semester, the beauty of German education system.

Re:Linux Developers?

[devoid42]

I've had the problem too. This was the first time I had tried to download a standard, and I was surprised that they charge a fee for it. How do they expect it to be a standard and charge such inappropriate amounts for it.

Nice to see someone up at this hour though, dfelznic

charging for standards

[tetsu]

If you ask me (and hey, nobody did) Charging for documentation on standards is what drives people to develop non-standard things. Nokia are making their clever way of sending ringtones and addressbook entries and suchlike open now.. I don't know if they are going to make people pay to use it. I hope not.. On the other hand, they should get something for their time and effort spend developing.....

MPEG Audio standard

[pjrc]

About 1 ½ years ago, I purchased a copy of ISO 11172-3, the MPEG1 audio spec, from Global Engineering Documents [ihs.com]. The hardcopy (a photocopy, reasonable quality) was $170. Before calling them and getting out my credit card, I did a couple quick searches on the net, and I found a Russian site that had a copy, but it wasn't accessible.

Well, I recently found a site with a copy, and it also has 13818-3, MPEG2 audio, and many other useful standards... but not 802.11. I'm debating if I should post a link from this slashdot article.... probably not, but you can find the site if you go to Peter Kovacs's mp3projects [mp3projects.com] site and follow links to various people's projects (mine is the third on the list, and I don't host any copies of these standards).

I was originally going to try to build a mp3 player with a low-end microcontroller and use a FPGA to implement a little engine that would use DMA and perform the polyphase filter and IMDCTs (approx 95% of the computation for mp3 decoding), and of course stream the data to a DAC. That would have been a lot of work, and when I started adding up the number of CLBs needed in the FPGA, it turned out to be less expensive to just buy the STA013 MP3 decoder chip, which also has the advantage of having the mp3 royalties rolled up into the price of the chip.

It certainly does suck that these standards are so expensive for students and hobbists.

802.11

[kevin42]

At one point not too long ago I was able to find the 802.11 1997 standard pdf file on ieee's website for free. Their site isn't well organized and I can't find it again. As a member I was able to purchase the 1999 version as a pdf for about $180. Depending on what you need it for, you probably will find most of what you want to know from the book The IEEE 802.11 Handbook : A Designer's Companion [fatbrain.com], but even that's expensive for what you get (a small paperback).

I'd really like to see ieee give out free pdf for use in open source projects, but I seriously doubt that will ever happen. :(

ISO standards documents

[couchslayer]

Note: to the best of what I remember, ...

ISO documents are charged, at least for paper copies, on a per-page basis; there's something rather weirdly high (like $.80 US - ish) assessed as a "copying fee". Why PDF files would be more expensive beats me.

For emerging standards, though, the ISO usually releases draft copies for public comment -- there's something like a 30-day window -- and these drafts, I believe are free. Plus, they tend to be fairly close to what actually goes in as a standard. This was recommended to me as the cheapest way to get copies of up-and-coming standards at the last CGATS (the graphics arts subcomittee of the ISO) meeting I was at.

Dunno if this will help in your case, but it might help someone, or down the road.