[SystemSafety] Making Standards available to Standards Committees

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

John Knight, Martyn Thomas, I, and others here, have occupied ourselves sporadically by commenting
on the inefficacy of current arrangements for engineering standardisation. For example,
http://scsc.org.uk/paper_126/protect_reg_01-Knight.pdf?pap=933 and
http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/WhitePapers/RVSsfssPrinciples.pdf

This week at a meeting of the German National Committee responsible for functional safety of E/E/PE
systems (and therefore IEC 61508 matters), the chair of a Working Group complained about the
unavailability of standards for standards-committee work. The German electrotechnical standards
organisation DKE makes all German standards available to all standards committees, but German
standards are often translations into German of ISO or IEC standards, and inadequate for work with
international import, for which one needs the ISO or IEC originals.

The official position is that each standards-committee member must buy hisher own copy of a
standards document which is needed. There is no discretion; the IEC (or ISO) holds copyright and
makes the document available for purchase, and German copyright law is pretty rigid.

This situation is appropriately characterised as "absurd" (there was general agreement).

Some standards organisations, and some Secretaries of committees in them (who are
standards-organisation employees) make discretely available to those committee members with a need
the FDIS of a standard, which may differ in only minor ways from the published standard. The FDIS
will be prominently watermarked "only to be used for standards development purposes". I don't know
the status of such practice. The CDVs and FDIS are made available by international agreement to all
standards workers and indeed competent engineers at development time, as part of the process of
eliciting comments, but I don't know what governs their use, if anything at all, after the standard
is published.

The Brits apparently have no problem. The BSI makes available British Standards for its committees
to work with, and these differ in only formal ways from the international standards where there are
such, but apparently sufficiently to render inoperative the IEC copyright.

Germany could do similarly. First, accept English as an appropriate language for German standards,
through a change in the law. But then a couple of publishing houses would have their business model
trashed, and "jobs would be lost", which is a discussion-ending comment here. (The usual response,
that everyone would be better off by paying the same people the same money to do nothing, has little
or no traction here.)

There might be something to this. There were lots of people in the room, and use of the word
"absurd" was not challenged. Maybe this could be taken to the DKE CEOs and thereby on to the IEC?
The IEC is pretty intransigent about its business model. But the issue would be on the table, and
that is a prelude to any movement on it.

There is considerable disagreement with parts of the IEC business model. Companies and people
provide their work on standards for free; the IEC makes money off it, and there is no quid pro quo
arrangement at all. *Everybody* brings this up. An engineer costs hisher company let's say €400 a
day, so even a moderately passive committee member will cost hisher company €4,000 a year; say
€12,000 for work on a document for three years. For travel costs, add some 50% on top of that (at
those prices, you wonder when decent videoconferencing is going to become generally available?). And
an active member costs ten times that much or even more (travel costs remain similar, though).

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de





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