Should technical standards decided and published by offi cial Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) and referred to in Regulations, Directives or, generally, in EU law be regarded as "law" that must be accessible to the public, or could these standards still be private goods, licensed for royalties and, indeed, only accessible by a few? Access to technical standards may be the next hot topic for the European Standard Setting Organisations (SSOs) and the EU Commission. Some SSOs, as a way to fi nance their activities to develop technical standards, may charge fi rms or third persons to access and make use of the technical standards produced. The charges are based on the copyright protection of said standards and may range from low to high depending on the SSO and the market penetration of the standard in question. 1 However, with increasing action by legislators of incorporating standards by reference into legal acts, the question is whether claiming copyright and, thus, charging for access to such technical standards, is still feasible. If technical standards, which are being used to interpret or fi ll in norms contained in laws and regulations have to be regarded as law, then their content should, according to the general consensus, belong to the public domain. According to several Member States' Copyright regimes and general legal thinking, laws and regulations should be publicly accessible free of charge since only free access complies with basic standards of democracy, rule of law and transparency. 2 If instead technical standards are not to be regarded as law, but as products of private intellectual, creative production, access may have to be paid for, by way of buying a license or by otherwise paying the price for the product of the standardization effort. 3 1