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On the Cost of IEEE and ISO Standards Documents?

Posted by Cliff on from the a-pocket-full-of-arms-and-legs dept.

jeffmock asks: "It seems that I bump against this problem a couple of times a year. Last year I was working on an MP3 project and I needed to read the spec for MPEG-I layer-3 audio. The document is ISO 13818-3 and it costs $150 to get a third generation, barely readable photocopy. It's not a freely available document. This week I want to read the 802.11 spec. You can purchase a hard copy from the IEEE for $288 or they will let you download a PDF file for $432. Is this right? I understand the need to fund standards efforts and limit the circulation of drafts while they're a work in progress. Does it make sense to put up this kind of financial barrier for established industry standards?"

3 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. MPEG Audio standard by pjrc · · Score: 2
    About 1 ½ years ago, I purchased a copy of ISO 11172-3, the MPEG1 audio spec, from Global Engineering Documents. The hardcopy (a photocopy, reasonable quality) was $170. Before calling them and getting out my credit card, I did a couple quick searches on the net, and I found a Russian site that had a copy, but it wasn't accessible.

    Well, I recently found a site with a copy, and it also has 13818-3, MPEG2 audio, and many other useful standards... but not 802.11. I'm debating if I should post a link from this slashdot article.... probably not, but you can find the site if you go to Peter Kovacs's mp3projects site and follow links to various people's projects (mine is the third on the list, and I don't host any copies of these standards).

    I was originally going to try to build a mp3 player with a low-end microcontroller and use a FPGA to implement a little engine that would use DMA and perform the polyphase filter and IMDCTs (approx 95% of the computation for mp3 decoding), and of course stream the data to a DAC. That would have been a lot of work, and when I started adding up the number of CLBs needed in the FPGA, it turned out to be less expensive to just buy the STA013 MP3 decoder chip, which also has the advantage of having the mp3 royalties rolled up into the price of the chip.

    It certainly does suck that these standards are so expensive for students and hobbists.

    --
    PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
  2. 802.11 by kevin42 · · Score: 2
    At one point not too long ago I was able to find the 802.11 1997 standard pdf file on ieee's website for free. Their site isn't well organized and I can't find it again. As a member I was able to purchase the 1999 version as a pdf for about $180. Depending on what you need it for, you probably will find most of what you want to know from the book The IEEE 802.11 Handbook : A Designer's Companion, but even that's expensive for what you get (a small paperback).

    I'd really like to see ieee give out free pdf for use in open source projects, but I seriously doubt that will ever happen. :(

  3. ISO standards documents by couchslayer · · Score: 3

    Note: to the best of what I remember, ...

    ISO documents are charged, at least for paper copies, on a per-page basis; there's something rather weirdly high (like $.80 US - ish) assessed as a "copying fee". Why PDF files would be more expensive beats me.

    For emerging standards, though, the ISO usually releases draft copies for public comment -- there's something like a 30-day window -- and these drafts, I believe are free. Plus, they tend to be fairly close to what actually goes in as a standard. This was recommended to me as the cheapest way to get copies of up-and-coming standards at the last CGATS (the graphics arts subcomittee of the ISO) meeting I was at.

    Dunno if this will help in your case, but it might help someone, or down the road.

    --
    If a woodchuck could, would it be too lazy to?