Congress Debates Who Owns Laws Written by Private Groups

Why It Matters

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet held a hearing on April 21 that put a sharp question to lawmakers: when a private organization writes a safety code that becomes law, does it still own that code? The Trump administration has signaled a broadly pro-copyright posture, aligning it with standards organizations seeking to preserve their revenue model, but two recent federal court losses for those groups have made the legislative fight more urgent.

The Big Picture

This congressional hearing roundup centers on the Pro Codes Act, legislation that would allow standards-developing organizations (SDOs) to retain copyright over their codes even after governments incorporate them into law, provided the codes are posted online for free. The bill failed to advance in the 118th Congress. Its return follows two consecutive circuit court defeats for SDOs: the D.C. Circuit's 2023 ruling in ASTM v. Public.Resource.Org and the Third Circuit's April 7, 2026 ruling in ASTM v. UpCodes, both finding that posting incorporated standards online likely constitutes fair use. Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced a Senate companion bill in March 2026, giving the effort bipartisan momentum heading into the Darrell Issa hearing.

What They're Saying: Congressional Testimony Summary

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who chairs the subcommittee and co-sponsors the House bill, framed the legislation as a compromise grounded in constitutional principle.

• Issa: "The American people have a right to see their laws. It doesn't mean they have a right to take it all."

Rep. Hank Johnson Jr. (D-GA), the ranking member, described a genuine dilemma: courts have said no one owns the law, but SDOs say copyright revenue funds the safety standards that prevent homes from burning down.

• Johnson: "Americans have a reasonable interest in knowing they can access the laws that govern them."

James Pauley, President and CEO of the National Fire Protection Association, offered a stark warning in his hearing witness statement: fire incidents in the U.S. have declined 54 percent since 1980, and he attributed that directly to the standards his organization produces. He told lawmakers that roughly 70 percent of NFPA's revenue comes from selling and licensing those codes. "If you take away copyright protection, the funding disappears," Pauley said, "and with it, the system that has made Americans safer for more than a century."

Keith Kupferschmid, CEO of the Copyright Alliance, told the subcommittee that the courts have produced "chaotic" and contradictory rulings on this issue, with multiple circuit courts explicitly inviting Congress to intervene. "There are directly conflicting decisions on copyrightability, on fair use throughout the country in different circuits," he said. Days before the hearing, Kupferschmid published a piece titled "Pro Codes Critics Have It Exactly Backwards" on the Copyright Alliance website, signaling the organization's aggressive pre-hearing posture.

The sharpest dissent came from John Delli Venneri of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, who testified against the bill despite representing an SDO. Venneri held up one volume of ASME's Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code to illustrate his point: the code runs 33 volumes, is used by manufacturers rather than consumers, and is incorporated by reference by roughly 90,000 jurisdictions without ASME's consent. "The person that decides whether or not my copyrighted material must be posted online for free is not the copyright holder," he said. "It's the roughly 90,000 jurisdictions in the United States."

Jonathan Band of Policybandwidth, the lone witness representing the public access side, called the bill unconstitutional. "ProCodes is unconstitutional," he said. "The government edicts doctrine is rooted in the Constitution. Allowing a private entity exclusive ownership of the law would run contrary to the rights of free expression and due process." Band proposed an alternative: require government agencies to incorporate standards directly into regulations and post the complete text on official websites, eliminating the need for the copyright workaround.

The hearing's most contentious exchange came when Issa pressed Band on whether commercial monetization of freely available materials qualifies as fair use, invoking the Napster case. Band said it did not, and Issa fired back that the same logic should limit what startups like UpCodes can do with SDO codes.

Political Stakes

A House Committee Hearing Latest With Cross-Partisan Complications

This hearing carries real stakes for Issa. As both subcommittee chair and House co-sponsor, he structured the witness panel to build a record in favor of the legislation, with three witnesses broadly aligned with SDO interests and one representing public access. But the hearing record itself complicated that effort: Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) submitted 15 documents into the record, including a July 2024 opposition letter she co-signed with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a Republican committee member. That cross-partisan alignment against the bill signals the legislation faces resistance even within the room.

Massie's opposition is particularly notable. A libertarian-leaning Republican who sits on the same subcommittee as the bill's sponsor, his presence as a skeptic puts Issa in a bind and undercuts any claim that this is a straightforward party-line issue. Lofgren, one of the most senior IP members on the committee, submitted ProPublica financial profiles of both the International Code Council and NFPA, suggesting she intends to raise questions about the financial interests driving the legislation.

For the SDOs, the stakes are existential. ASME spent over $1 million lobbying on copyright-related issues in the past year, according to lobbying disclosures. NFPA filed for $119,000 in the first quarter of 2026 alone, focused specifically on the Pro Codes Act. UpCodes, the startup that won the Third Circuit case, spent $410,000 over the past four quarters lobbying for public access to incorporated standards.

The Other Side: Congressional Hearing Roundup on Opposition Arguments

The Association of Research Libraries has called the bill an attempt to "grant private entities exclusive copyright ownership over elements of the law." The Re:Create Coalition argues the public has a right to freely access and reuse the law without restriction. The Electronic Frontier Foundation framed the UpCodes ruling as vindicating a core principle: copyright cannot stop people from reading and speaking the law.

Venneri's testimony added an unexpected dimension to the opposition. His argument that the bill's one-size-fits-all mandate fails to distinguish between consumer-facing building codes and complex manufacturer-facing engineering standards gave lawmakers a substantive reason to demand revisions, even if they support the bill's general goals.

What's Next

The Pro Codes Act failed to advance out of the 118th Congress despite a committee markup. The April 21 hearing is a step toward another markup attempt in the 119th Congress, but the Lofgren-Massie opposition and Venneri's testimony suggest the bill will need revision before it can clear the subcommittee. The ASTM v. UpCodes case was decided only on a preliminary injunction standard, meaning the full merits case will return to the district court, giving Congress ongoing pressure to act.

The Bottom Line

The fight over who owns the law is no longer just a courtroom dispute, and the outcome will determine whether the private organizations that write America's safety codes can keep charging for them.

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