It is indeed true that in all of my examples, someone's paid to print something. Printing is part of the cost.

In the case of Wikipedia, people sit in offices and print letters, for example its lawyers who respond every time someone sues the foundation. I don't believe that printing letters to the courts forms a major part of fighting those lawsuits, though. Britannica itself hasn't been published on paper for almost ten years now, but even when it was, printing was a small part of the cost. The editors cost much more. The school paid for the school books and the teachers, and again, the actual printing of the school books is a minor part. The teacher's salary is much, much more, and even the school book publisher's authors and editors are paid more than the printers.

Focusing on some minor cost and insisting that it's unreasonable, and therefore the whole is unreasonable, is stupid.

You seem to be missing the point.

Britannica or Wikipedia or any publisher of most facts/definitions/similar don't actually own those facts or definitions, you pay them for their work in packaging it and, I guess, phrasing.

The definition of a metre, to circle back, is free, and yet people seem to still pay for it in various ways, by your own account. People can still be paid for work.

Edit: Seen another way, if I paid someone specifically for the definition of a metre, anyone could produce a product for me, but in this case only ISO can (at least with current phrasing, layout, etc). I imagine the cost for the metre definition wouldn't be very high, and there would probably be accurate enough open information alternatives. We don't even have to imagine.

Hopefully clarifies my OP.

=== Opinion section ===

Locking standards/laws/facts behind paywalls and copyrighting it breeds a society with even more inequality where the haves and have-nots have different access to basic information we all have to adher to.

Standards are a type of information where if you have to adher to it it should be open to any to use as they need.

> Focusing on some minor cost and insisting that it's unreasonable, and therefore the whole is unreasonable, is stupid.

No cost is minor for everyone, especially not in aggregate with all other "small costs".

But to clarify, the argument is regarding what we pay for, not my stance on how it should be (which might be too prominent).

I'm not missing it, I think it's unimportant. It's a small portion of the cost, why argue about it instead of the large parts?

ISO needs to pay its costs. The licensing it has chosen delivers about 50% of the necessary income. The copying is cheap, that's true, but ISO needs to pay all of its costs, not just the copying.

That you dismiss the distinction out of opinion on its' importance proves you indeed missed it.

Whether or not ISO needs to be paid for the work it does or not is irrelevant to the discussion on whether their standards are free (they're not) and the definition of a metre is (it is).

Opinion:

If governments use them for eg regulation, maybe they should be funded by governments and be a non-profit.

Yes, well... I've both written actual standards and worked professionally on software that many non-users insisted should be licensed differently, and I suppose I've heard these arguments too often over the years and have become numb.

Someone's intention is that something should be free (in some way in which it is not), the effect of the proposed change would be to stop the work to produce that something. It's a good intention every time, but I'm tired of having it stop there. Wake me up when the proposal is one that doesn't disrupt the funding. And remember that when any one stakeholder thinks two things are related, then they effectively are.

This probably sounds as if I'm ignoring you, perhaps rudely. That's not entirely false. I heard so many people insist that some part of our business plan was irrelevant to the rest, it's really difficult to still really pay attention.

The lesson from that is that if you want to change ISO's ways, you have to not sound like n previous people and trigger that reflex. Because ISO employs people who are much more polite than I am, but they too will stop listening if you sound like too many people they've rejected before, because that's a human reflex.

Purely technical drawings and textual descriptions are not considered works here, unless you e.g wrap it in a poem. And regardless of the copyright status, actual information content itself can't be copyrighted so standards could at least in theory rewritten as a crowsourced effort.