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Comment by wurzeltrick | Hacker News Reader

European court ruled in favor of free public access to european norms referenced by legislature in laws or ordinances. This probably has widespread consequences for local norma like DIN in Germany. Case was initiated by Carl Malamud who fights for open access to standards.

https://www.righttoknow.ie/2019/04/02/right-to-know-and-publ...

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Hopefully. I am an certified electrical engineer in Germany and the full norms I (and everybody else in Germany) have to comply with cost upwards of 1400 Euros per year.

Saying in the law you have to respect the technical norms and then be like: "Yeah but you can only see them when you pay a heckton of money" is totally immoral.

Fifteen or so years ago, Swedish legislators took the 200 pages of electric code, replaced them with 13 pages essentially just saying "whatever the Swedish standardization organization says is safe." And paywalled.

I can understand delegating from law to something that doesn't require 180 people agreeing on a change heavy in domain knowledge. I'm not an electrician, so I'm not allowed to do anything anyway (oh, the protected guilds,) but this is going in the wrong direction.

The thing with guilds is: There is a lot of electrical a non-professional could do themselves safely, if the right materials and techniques are used — but like with everything the problem is knowing and recognizing the small number of situations where circumstances align just right to produce a safety hazard for yourself and others.

I am a self though electrical engineer myself, I just took the exam to prove my knowledge is on par with a master of the guild. So I profoundly agree that this knowledge should be not only free, but as clearly formulated as possible.

Yes. Cable dimensioning and selecting fuses sure is something you can screw up. However, the way things are now, there's no way to have e.g. a consultant help where needed, so you're either paying someone to do everything, or you're completely on your own. (We need an app for that...)

Given that money is a finite resource, I don't see how this dichotomy is in the best interest of safety.

I didn't know and wouldn't even have considered that to be the case. To be honest, that's actually mindblowing and infuriating.

The case was against the European Commission who refused to disclose the standards.

I think it is clear in the article, but it is generally better not to say "European Court" but "European Court of justice" or "ECJ" to distinguish it (a purely EU institution) from the European Court of Human Rights.

Saying "EU Court" is also non-ambiguous, as ECHR is not an EU institution, but a CoE (Council of Europe) institution.

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