Well it should be unconstitutional for any law or government ordinance to demand compliance with any standards that are pay-to-copy.

Arguably the government should publish a blessed magnet link of a blessed torrent file per each field of standard. Probably with the padding files used to make each PDF individually hash-checkable.

If nothing else it's a practical way of declaring what standard version is the legally significant one. It's usable without actually sharing any of the PDFs anyways.

1. They still make the data freely available. 2. Hosting the data is not free.

Have they ever claimed they "own" any of the data?

To me it's just about site admins doing the bare minimum to keep the site running.

At least for international standards and a lot of academic research, a case can be made that the former should be freely available simply because everyone should have access to them and the latter is often enough funded by taxpayer money.

? it would be hypocritical to do the opposite thing - to restrict access on stolen data

Same exact thing applies to physical libraries. If they were attempted in the last 50 years, they too would be illegal. And all books could be confiscated, building be sold at police auction, and the people who run it would be in prison.

It was only because libraries were made 120 years ago BY billionaires of their time (Carnegie, etc), and was a a way for those billionaires to sanitize their history of abuse by philanthropy.

On the reverse, we have Annas Archive, Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, Archive.org and others. Made by average non-billionaire humans sharing knowledge in the largest free libraries. Except they're demonized and criminalized.

There really isnt a difference at all with physical in person library, and an online free library. And using a phone camera, is also trivial to copy a book within a span of 10 minutes. You dont even need to borrow it - just sit in a carousel and scan scan scan.