Code Swaraj
pro bono as our senior advocate. We are in front of the Honorable High Court of Delhi in New Delhi.
It is papered over, in the sense of BIS has answered our complaint. We responded. The union government has failed to respond. We’re before the court again in November 13th, and our hope is that the chief justice, or the judge who is presiding, will order an oral argument early next spring. That we will have our day to state our piece, the government will state its piece; and the government will render a verdict.
[Anuj Srinivas] Sure. Carl, as I understand it here, BIS’s defense rests on copyright for one. Another thing that it also talks about is the fact that it needs to be compensated for creating these standards. One of the differences between the United States and India is that in the United States, standards which eventually become law and regulation are formulated by private bodies. Here in India, the BIS is a statutory body that sometimes—I would say most of the standards it comes up with, eventually, assume the force of law. To a certain extent, its revenues come from selling these standards to companies, to colleges, to private individuals. Are you opposed to BIS’s revenue model as well? Do you believe that in this day and age, it needs to be made public, and we shouldn’t worry about the cost that went into creating those standards in the first place?
[Carl Malamud] Let’s deal with India, and then let’s deal with the rest of the world.
[Anuj Srinivas] Sure.
[Carl Malamud] In India, these are government documents. Less than 4% of their revenue comes from the sale of standards. If you want to sell a product in India, it has to be certified. Do you know who you pay for the certification? Bureau of Indian Standards. They get plenty of money. Not only that, this is vital to their mission, right. The public safety. By rationing access to standards, you are not educating engineers nearly as well as you could. You are not allowing local officials to enforce the building code the way they need to, because they have to spend 14,000 rupees in order to purchase one of these things. Rationing access to public safety information runs counter to their mission, and they don’t need the money. They have money coming in from other places.
Now, the rest of the world has private NGOs develop the standards, and then government adopts them into law. Let me say a couple of things. The NGOs
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