If the copyright owner (NFPA) is not a party to the case, the ruling cannot go against them. But there could be a complicated mess, anyway.
My defense of NFPA might work like this. They publish their product. They own the copyright on it. They grant limited licenses to use the product in certain ways. They do not grant any license to publish without per-copy royalties. Does a state or local governmental entity have any right to usurp federal copyright and property law and take away the rights NFPA has? No. So these entities just don't have a right to freely/openly publish.
Can a court order party A to take property from party B, where party B is not even a defendant in the case, and give that property to party C? I think not, unless it can fall under eminent domain. Then see below, anyway.
The implications of a ruling that says all laws, including references, must be freely available, would mean that affected jurisdictions would have to not use NFPA to be in a position of compliance. The practical effect is that we would not have a funding mechanism for the level of engineering research that is needed for the NEC.
The issue will become political, and in the end the only practical answer is for a federally funded agency to take over NEC and make it law of the land on a federal basis. Do we want that? It wouldn't really bother me that much if it went this way. For example, agencies like the FCC have to do a lot of engineering work for the regulations they have. Imagine having something like "Federal Electrical Safety Commission".
But in the end, the courts could not force NFPA to continue to develop NEC and give it away for free. If they forced NEC to be free (eminent domain being the only way I see to take it ... and that requires reimbursement, anyway) then the NFPA would likely abandon future development along those lines except to the extent of making proposals in their own interest to that suggested "FESC".
