IPMC and other ICC building codes now publicly accessible online for free
The International Code Council, Inc. (ICC) has now made not just the 2009 International Property Maintenance Code (IPMC) freely accessible online to the general public, but the entire ICC family of building codes. We at FairFAR.org want to offer our heartfelt thanks to the City of Boulder for pressing the copyright and public access issues with the ICC. While the copyright and private ownership issues with standardized codes remain intellectually troublesome, having free public online access to the proposed code and codes already enacted into law makes an enormous practical difference.
This is a tremendous improvement with with respect to where the public stood previously when they attempted to read their own building codes online, and we want to acknowledge that all parties have moved a long way from a situation in which citizens engaged with their democratic process online were faced with Caligulan[1] restrictions on their ability to access, read and know the laws that applied to them.
We still hope to see the city release a version of the draft ordinance that won’t require readers to switch back and forth between the draft ordinance and the IPMC model code to determine whether a particular IPMC subsection is to be adopted with no changes, or is instead marked as to be deleted or replaced by city-authored text; that would certainly make the draft ordinance read more intelligibly.
The 2009 IPMC is also linked from the City’s SmartRegs webpage.
[1] The Roman tyrant Caligula placed his new laws so high on a pillar his citizens couldn’t possibly read or know what to do to obey them, in order that he could delight in tormenting them. This historical episode is generally regarded as one of the bases for the legal principle known as the promulgation of the law, and is cited in one of the foundational federal cases establishing that laws are citizen-owned and hence not copyrightable (Banks & Bros. v. West Pub. Co., 27 F. 50 C.C.D. Minn. 1886) [see p. 57]. And, as William Patry implied when he quoted from this case while reviewing the relevant chain of federal court decisions concerning Oregon’s aborted attempt to claim copyright on their state laws, for the full text of the law to remain inaccessible online for free in the 21st century would be analogous to Caligula’s placing the laws atop a high pillar–in both cases, the law would be placed unreasonably out of reach for ordinary citizens.