Dear Tom,
On di, 2015-06-16 at 23:12 +0200, Tom Blecher wrote:
But wait: it is surely € per user
The terms and conditions mention:
"The Standards Flat Rate service is only open to companies and tradespeople. Reproduction and resale of documents obtained in the Standards Flat Rate service is prohibited."[1]
So if organized efficiently all ten developers can be part of the same flat rate.
[1] http://www.beuth.de/en/area/lizenzhinweis-flatrate-e
In addition I would assume the standards documents can be kept and used afterwards, allowing say a year to be skipped if no relevant changes occur.
To further reduce the cost I guess it would even be possible to create a summary of the standard, although it is hard to include all the details without infringing on copyright.
And of course this does nothing for the patent licenses.
Es I remember that a typical university pays fees about 100.000€ for all of their annual users. Nothing which turns to be their property (effectively at least, if this does matter for some), we are just dealing with temporarily reading rights - and only if you do not use it commercially.
That's why my university has stopped offering bulk access to standards for both students and employees. If required single standards are bought.
Have we any solution for that? Are there careers depending on the public opinion (specs fee is least_ problem) officially tought up to now? Which careers? Who designed them, what fore? That might be key questions.
In a way the better strategy could be to develop competing, more liberal standards. Although that would again require some level of cooperation of established entities.
Kind regards, Nico Rikken