Internet. I found building codes, safety of hazardous materials, worker safety on the factory floor, methods for testing for lead in water, and much more that had been incorporated into law at the federal or state level in the United States. All told, I had posted over 1,400 such laws.
This work had started in 2008 when I posted the California Building Code, which I purchased for $979.95. By 2012, I had posted mandatory building codes for all the states, as well as plumbing, fire, electrical, fuel and gas, and other codes. I had also begun posting a large number of standards required by federal law, documents such as legal requirements to prevent oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic Ocean, railroad safety specifications, toy safety standards, and baby and infant products, such as car seats, cribs, playpens, strollers, swings, and bath tubs.
In 2013, I was sued by three standards organizations over several hundred of these public safety laws. The next year, three more plaintiffs had filed a second suit, and the two cases had progressed together through the courts with six plaintiffs and their four fancy white-shoe law firms.
There was no disagreement between us and the plaintiffs on a crucial point: every single one of the codes they sued me for are the law of the land. The plaintiffs, however, felt they should have an exclusive right to distribute these laws in any manner they felt was appropriate. They required any private citizen or government official who wished to quote the law to ask for their permission first. That permission was arbitrarily denied or granted at their whim. For example, they denied students the right to incorporate formulas from the sfaety laws in their class projects.
When we posted standards, it was not a simple scan and dump run. Because our government operates slowly, many of the codes that still had the force of law were no longer for sale by the standards bodies because they were supplanted by newer versions. I scoured the used book markets on Amazon, Abebooks, and eBay to find copies of many of these documents.
Once I received a document, we went through an elaborate process to prepare them for posting. All the standards were scanned and run through optical character recognition (OCR) and then a cover sheet was prepended to the document explaining that it had been incorporated into law and by what agency. In the case of several hundred of the standards that had that were particularly important to safety, we retyped the entire codes into modern HTML, redrew the diagrams, coded the documents so people with visual disabilities
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