Re: US consumer products design reference - what inventors should know



This standards thing has gone beyond ensuring that products are safe, has
become a whole parasitic industry. By making it complicated enough, you
now probably have to hire some consultant, just to tell you which $1000
standards you need to buy, which will then tell you to do things you were
going to do anyway, and then you can look forward to the cost of the
testing.

If this product is for technically minded users, maybe you could do it as a
semi-assembled kit, which probably avoids some of the difficulties, at the
expense of requiring a lot more customer support.

If there were a government that really wanted to have a lot of start-ups,
then that country would either buy outright, or create from scratch a
complete set of standards, make them as strict in every respect as the
strictest of the widely used standards in the rest of the world, declare
that they are legally adequate standards for products sold in their
country, and then place the lot in the public domain.

I think that it would be interesting if someone were to compile a list, by
country, of the overhead cost of starting company and selling an electronic
product, the "null product" - where we assume that the design itself is
trivial, but just count the cost of buying standards, health and safety
audits, compliance testing fees, government bribes^H^H^H^H^H^Hregistration
fees, WEEE registration etc. If this list were published every year, it
might focus the attention of certain politicians on the reason why they
seem to have so much trouble reducing unemployment and achieving positive
balance of payments.

Chris


Well said. How can it be that a private company, and a claimed non-profit organization, has managed to appoint itself as the sole arbiter of product safety, yet keep the standards themselves such a well-guarded secret? Our laws are not secret, public safety should not be either. The document pricing, restrictive licensing, and secretive way the UL guards their IP, all show the goal is more profit oriented than safety oriented. Heck, maybe Microsoft should apply for not-for-profit status.

I have no doubt that consumer products are safer having been designed to set standards, but once those standards become a requirement (in essence, the law) the text should be freely available, or at least reasonably priced. Even thick technical books rarely cost more than $100, mainly due to competition. Only a monopolistic entity could get away with charging so much more for similar information.

I noticed my latest monitor has at least a dozen certification marks on the back. Why so many, since I believe CE meets or exceeds most of them. Maybe its time for a comprehensive set of open standards?






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