Real Reason
 

$$$$$$$. Remember, each organization that has rules needs to publish a rule book. This means all coaches, officials and possibly others need to purchase a rule book. By having a different rule book these organizations sell rule books, either as an individual cost, or as part of a registration fee of some sort. The publishing agency may not make a lot of money off the rule books, or they may a lot of money off the rule books.

Thinking simply about the Michigan High School Athletic Association since this is where I work.

Let's say we have 1000 officials statewide in a sport. We get new rule books every two seasons from the MHSAA. If the MHSAA gets the books for $3 from the NFHS and our registration fee is $12 per sport, then the MHSAA is making $6 off the books in one year (assuming casebook and rulesbook like softball has) and $12 in another year since they don't provide us with the books. The same rule book that the NFHS has sold the MHSAA may cost $2 to actually print, thus the NFHS makes $1 per book sold to the state association.


If there wasn't a financial component to this, you wouldn't see this many different rule codes.



It is no different than the hijack to the thread about car parts. Each manufacturer has slightly different parts because they make the parts (or a related supplier does) and as such, they need to make money off the parts. If all cars used the same basic battery then the companies would make 1 basic battery and very few organizations would make batteries because the scale of production would be more important than the specification of production.

Not exactly a need, but a benefit: People nationwide can benefit from the feedback over a wide area wherein players & officials have faced the same problems, and avoid duplic'n of effort in solving, or at least addressing, them. Like the National Fire Protection Ass'n code.

The fact that many football leagues that aren't even members of a Fed member ass'n adopt Fed rules entirely or as a base show that they do pretty well in the marketplace. Another bit of proof is that not only do they use Fed rules, but they use Fed rules that are either current or 1 season out of date, rather than, say, from a decade or 50 yrs. earlier. (Many adult leagues like to use the previous season's rules from a major governing body so as to benefit from others' experience & rulings.) it's a lot like the benefits from a vaccine: You get the best benefit if there's a huge pool out there using it, while you're free to do something else, and it's best if you're not among the 1st to use it.

No, that's ridiculous, because to the beneficiaries of a sport itself, that's a cost, not a benefit. Softball is not a proprietary game like Monopoly. At best a body can make money off a participant sport by selling or renting equipment or facilities, like their gym, the way Ping Pong is a proprietary set of equipment for playing table tennis, or sell club membership.

The amount of copyrightable material in a rule book for something like softball is negligible as concerns the rules content itself (i.e. not yearbook details). Copyright protects only literary expression, not ideas. I suppose the amendments to a year's softball rules could be treated as a trade secret, but that's laughable.
Which is why today we're all using Apple microcomputers, right?

Beleive what you want.

If it were really a cost, why would the NFHS not use ASA rules for softball, MLB or NCAA rules for baseball, NCAA rules for basketball, ect. The rules of the game really are not that different.

For the reasons given upthread.

What if the profit margin were as you figured--would that be enough revenue to pay for the work of those bodies in preparing the contents of those rule books? How many total copies do you think they sell?

You might as well think public corporations stayed in business to prepare their annual reports!
By that logic, why would even a single governing body ever revise their rules? The difference between one edition of NFHS softball rules and the next must be less than between theirs and ASA's for the same year.

Governing bodies come & go for sports. When women's intercollegiate basketball stopped being played under AIAW and switched to NCAA, do you think it had anything to do with the business of publishing? How about when AAU dropped its presence in men's basketball? "Oh no, these people outcompete us in rule book publishing! We're out of business."