In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Arnold Tibus" writes: >A summary somewhat easier to read you can find here: > >CE Marking: Your Passport to the European Union >http://www.i-b-t.net/anm/templates/trade_article.asp?articleid=262&zoneid=3 > >perhaps it can bring some more light into the darkness of the >worldtrade and the european market.
HA! It doesn't even scratch the surface. First of all, that article incorporates, tacitly, US corporate legal liability thinking. Mostly, there are only two steps in the generic CE process: Sign a piece of paper that says that you put the CE mark there. Put the CE mark there. If your product does not live up to CE requirement, you have just made yourself the bulls-eye of the lawsuit or regulatory action. Obviously, anybody in a sane frame of mind would check that the requirements are met before doing that, but the law doesn't demand that you do so, it just assigns the liability. In select areas, where the danger to life and limb is greater than normal, cars, airbags and similar, there is a positive documentation requirement. As far as I know, no plain electrical gadget is under that regime, until voltages above 500V are exposed or radio transmission is involved. Once you get beyond electrical gadgets, it gets weirder. Take building materials: if they are CE marked, they can be sold anywhere in the EU, but that doesn't mean that you are actually allowed to build with them where you live. A window that complies with building codes in Greece fail northern energy-concious building codes. What Denmark consider a sound structual wall material would crumble in the first minor tremblor in Greece. You buy insulation materials from the northern end, and fumigate your house in the southern end ? You'd better not plan on moving back into the house because it will take years for the poison gas to be released again. They're talking about putting CE marks on foodstuffs also, but that is even more fraught with peril, because the "sell before date" is climate variant on a lot of foodstuffs. Poul-Henning -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.