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

tns1 wrote:



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?

Yes, but you'll need a bunch of "lobbyists" with sufficient cash to grease
the right politicians, or it will never get adopted, and therefore will not
allow you to sell products. I think there is something called the
"official journal" or something like that in the EU, which is a list of the
standards that the governments will admit to having heard of. I think it
is probably expensive to get on that list. There would be enough competent
people and companies who are sick of being ripped off, that actually coming
up with the technical content of the standards would probably not be the
hard part.

Chris

.

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