I figure this should be a straightforward case of eminent domain.
Say you own a house. The government needs to take your house to demolish it to build a road. The government is within its rights to just take it (after due process and fair payment).
Now say you own a document that you make people pay to read. The government needs to take your document to make it part of the law to build a building code. Why doesn't the government exercise same kind of rights to just take it (after due process and fair payment)?
> Why doesn't the government make their own document?
(Sorry this is a US-centric explanation, I don't really understand how the EU system works)
Sometimes legislators say "We don't feel like having government employees write this particular set of regulations from scratch. Instead we'll make a law that says such-and-such a document written by a private organization is effectively promoted to a law."
There are three separate questions here: (1) Should legislators promote documents to laws? (2) Should legislators be allowed to promote documents to laws? (3) If legislators do promote a document to a law, how should the legal system interpret that action?
If you say "(1): No," then you should vote for a Congress / President that doesn't think it's okay to promote documents to laws. But sometimes a Congress / President might be elected that does think it's okay, and they might promote some documents to laws.
US law currently says "(2): Yes." If you think it should say "(2): No" you probably need to change the system. I.e. pass a Constitutional amendment, which is extremely difficult, much harder than merely voting in a Congress / President that agrees with you. Good luck on that.
That means it comes down to (3). Which is where I make the analogy with eminent domain. You had a document that people were paying you money for. The government made that document part of the law, and the law must be freely available, so now because of the government's actions, people aren't paying you money because a copy of your thing is now free.
Sure, the government could have not promoted the document to a law. Or the system could be set up so the government isn't allowed to promote documents to laws.
But those things that could have happened didn't happen. Instead, what actually happened is the government promoted your document to a law.
Why didn't they make their own document instead of promoting yours? It doesn't matter at this point. They did promote your document, and they are allowed to do it under the current system.
The obvious ways to resolve the conundrum are: (a) Make people pay to see the law, or (b) Make the law free and have the taxpayers compensate you for the lost revenue of the document, or (c) Make the law free and you just have to suck it up, too bad, so sad.
(a) just feels icky because it effectively means the law is a secret. Penalizing people for violating laws they can't know about (without paying) seems pretty unfair and maybe violates some legal principles (due process maybe), I dunno the specifics, not a lawyer. (c) definitely seems wrong too because it seems like "the government took my stuff and didn't pay me for it" falls (or should fall) under eminent domain even if the thing the government took isn't land. That leaves (b), I can't really think of any other options
You missed the key feature of eminent domain when talking about the standards yet remembered it when discussing your prior example...
Renumeration.
They would simply pay "fair market value" for the rights, though likely there'd be a push for a cooperative between nations which spread the cost widely, making the actual cost to any given nation relatively tiny.
> nobody will make the effort afterwards to make good standards
That's not true. If 3000 people a year would have paid you $100 for access over the next 20 years, that's $300,000, which as a future income stream has some PV X. You'll be indifferent [1] between collecting the trickle of revenue from customers paying the paywall, and a one-time lump sum from the government of X [2].
[1] You'll be indifferent by definition. Because you'd say "Yes please" to a lump sum of $1 trillion, "No thanks" to a lump sum of $1, and PV is defined to be the crossover point where your answer changes.
[2] If you have a discount rate of 5%, then X ~= $300,000 / 1.05^10 or so, depending on how front-loaded the payments are and how much you care about payments more than 20 years in the future.
> quite unfair in fact
If the government pays you less than X, in theory it's unconstitutional, plain and simple. If the legal system doesn't accept your projected revenue, or discount rate, or you have to pay the lawyers and expert witnesses too much to legally establish the basis for those calculations...well then, the problem isn't the government taking your document to make it part of the law. The problem is the legal system is too inefficient or unreasonable, which has a different set of fixes (e.g. make laws about what calculations the government has to use in this situation, and make the government pay the plaintiff's attorney fees if the case is sufficiently clear-cut instance of "the government didn't follow its own official rules and this should never have gotten to court in the first place")
Say you own a house. The government needs to take your house to demolish it to build a road. The government is within its rights to just take it (after due process and fair payment).
Now say you own a document that you make people pay to read. The government needs to take your document to make it part of the law to build a building code. Why doesn't the government exercise same kind of rights to just take it (after due process and fair payment)?