Over at Right to Know Heather Brooke reopens the debate about how many times the public has to pay for it’s own information.
The taxpayer pays a very large amount for the State to gather verify and collate information. Many commercial and citizen groups would like to get their hands on this data without having to pay all over again. For example Open Source mapping groups would like to get the Ordnance Survey databases so that new services could be provided to the taxpayer for free. Equally Lawyers will know well the significant cost of consolidated reports and there are many other examples. Each time the public pays a commercial entity for a service incorporating Crown data it also pays a proportion of the licence fee charged to that company by the Crown. They thus pay many times over for the same data. Simultaneously the market for such services is inevitably smaller because the barriers to entry are higher.
At the moment the government charges for this data, but the YRTK article argues that this “short termist ” attitude is detrimental to the knowledge economy: Crown copyright results in a smaller overall market. By comparison US ’socialist’ practices result in a larger and more vibrant information economy that ultimately generates more tax revenue as a result.
Not only is the problem with commercial activities but even Parliamentary democracy is damaged: when They Work for You attempted to copy Hansard’s material in order to allow the public to know what their MPs were doing, they were made aware of the Crown copyright position. Geeklawyer is aware from sources close to the matter that the Crown were not keen on hauling them into court because of the terrible publicity that would ensue. Nonetheless Crown copyright should not trump democratic participation as a matter of principle not litigation pragmatism.
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