America’s Safety Standards
Are Under Attack.
Stop the Pro Codes Act

Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) write the safety standards that keep Americans safe and secure, and American industries in a position of global leadership.

The Pro Codes Act would require that any safety standards referenced in laws or regulations be posted online for free. This might sound like a good thing on its surface but in reality, it would either force SDOs to forfeit their copyrights or strip them entirely of their ability to generate revenue, which would mean the processes they fund to develop these standards would cease to exist. 

And so additionally, while Pro Codes looks to address consumer standards, it negatively impacts SDOs who work on highly technical standards that are not lobbied into law.

We must ensure that SDOs are protected so they can do their jobs effectively to the benefit of us all.

Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) are typically private or non-profit entities responsible for developing voluntary consensus standards within specific industries or sectors. SDOs like ASME do not receive funding from the government or from industry to support their standards setting activities. Instead, they rely upon their copyright, funding their mission through the sale of their standards.

The development of ASME standards are open to all who are interested in participating without fee. ASME uses a balance of interest process that includes industry experts, government regulators, inspectors, insurers, and others interested stakeholders to inform our standards development. This ensures that no one interest group dominates the standards setting process. Standards developed by SDOs like ASME are voluntary technical documents that only become mandatory if a legislature or regulatory body by passage of law or regulation decides to make it so.

By gutting our system for safety standards, the consequences of this legislation would:

• Risk public safety: The Pro Codes Act would undermine SDOs' ability to maintain and update critical safety codes, potentially leaving industries like manufacturing and construction with outdated or inadequate standards that jeopardize public safety.

• Threaten economic stability: SDOs help ensure industries remain consistent and reliable. If they go out of business, gaps will need to be filled by inefficient government programs, leading to delays and increased costs that could harm industrial growth and America’s competitiveness while burdening taxpayers. 
  

• Undermine national security: While intended to make technical standards more accessible, the bill’s unintended consequences would compromise sensitive infrastructure, weaken cybersecurity, and give foreign adversaries a strategic advantage.

• Send the copyright industry into uncertainty: The bill would force SDOs to forfeit their copyrights if they fail to post standards for free online. This change could have implications across other industries, allowing domestic and foreign entities to exploit standards, create derivative works and undermine intellectual property protections, even including the music, film and publishing industries.
  

As a result, Congress has rejected this bill twice before, but proponents are trying to quickly move this forward.

This is an internal industry dispute on the model for safety standards development. While this shouldn’t be resolved by the government, the reality is certain organizations see this as an opportunity to secure an advantage for themselves over others in the private market of standards development.

The Pro Codes Act was marked up and moved through the House Judiciary Committee without a hearing or an opportunity for SDOs such as ASME and others to express their concerns. This is reckless for a bill of this magnitude. The Pro Codes Act is a major alteration to copyright law and represents a federal taking of intellectual property rights.

The Pro Codes Act is not what it claims to be and does not have the unified support of the SDOs that America relies on for its safety and security.

Because most SDOs are completely reliant upon the copyrights of their standards to produce the income necessary to draft and maintain their codes, a blind mandate that all standards incorporated by reference be made available for free will have a devastating effect on SDOs and their ability to carry out their missions. The only choice the Pro Codes Act gives an SDO after a governmental authority chooses to adopt its standard is the slow death of ever decreasing revenue once its standards are put in the public domain and are exploited by opportunistic third parties or an immediate death upon total loss of their copyright.

Our coalition is far-reaching. We are millions of engineers and technical experts across America, world-leading SDOs, top legal experts, national security and economic analysts, and more. 

Members include the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Welding Society, ASTM International, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the North American Energy Standards Board, the National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Inspectors and SAE International.

Interested in joining? Send us a note at TK.

Yes! Some SDOs draft standards that are specifically intended to be incorporated into laws and regulations for an entire subject matter. Oftentimes these works will include references to standards written by others. For the most part, these are local health and safety codes broadly applicable to many stakeholders, often including ordinary consumers. These SDOs lobby state and local legislatures to adopt their standards that often amount to an entire regulatory framework.

The majority of SDOs, ASME included, DO NOT lobby for their standards to be incorporated in this way. For this majority of SDOs and their standards, incorporation by reference is often no more than a bare citation to a standard in an extrinsic law or regulation. These standards very often have no application to ordinary consumers and address highly complex engineering issues such as the construction of nuclear power plants.

The core support for the Pro Codes Act comes from those that write consumer facing standards that wish to have their works adopted wholesale as an entire regulatory framework

Yes. The Pro Codes Act is an unconstitutional government taking of intellectual property rights from entities like ASME and other SDOs that do not lobby for their standards to be incorporated into law. More importantly, because a mere citation is not copyright infringement, SDOs like ASME are incapable of preventing citation by a governmental agency into laws or regulations. Thus, by a federal, state, local, or municipal government doing no more than making a simple citation to a standard, the bill would force SDOs to publish their cited, copyrighted standards on the web for free, granting every citizen or non-citizen individual or business an unencumbered right to the entire publication.

The Pro Codes Act would force ASME and other SDOs to make standards available for free online. Members of Congress who support intellectual property have repeatedly gone on record opposing forced tech transfers, most recently in response to an Administration proposal for expanded march-in rights.

The loss of American SDOs on the world stage will leave American standards creation in the hands of governmentally run standards bodies in China, Russia, and the European Union. And everyone – no matter who you are – should be gravely concerned about the potential impacts on American public safety and national security.

Right now, the bill is being considered by the House Judiciary Committee – please click here and take one minute to tell your Member of Congress to oppose this bill.