That being the precedent, once a building code is accepted into law, the full text of construction building codes becomes public domain. The court ruled exactly that, an individual cannot be penalized for copy pasting building code to other platforms and offering free access to the text.
The problem is that code publishers have a financial interest to restrict access to the codes (the above court case was one such example). Therefore they create endpoints with restrictive access and encourage local governments to use their endpoints to access the codes in a neutered manner, for example, copy-paste disabled, and other superficial obstacles, with plenty of warnings, end-user agreements, etc.
However the above 5th circuit case is the state of the law. Yet I can't find any state governments offering the codes digitally. It's always a referral to one of these neutered sites.
It would be great to have a plain text version of the code, especially to put it in a git repo and diff the changes each time codes are updated by the local government.
The above should be perfectly legal, as the code, once adopted, becomes public domain. Any thoughts on this?
In the UK, the code is BS7671 from the IET with related publications about specialist installations, but the law which governs the application of them is the Electricity at Work Act, 1989.