Our taxes fund the collection of public data – yet we pay again to access it. Make the data freely available to stimulate innovation, argue Charles Arthur and Michael Cross

Thursday March 9, 2006 The Guardian
Imagine you had bought this newspaper for a friend. Imagine you asked them to tell you what’s in the TV listings – and they demanded cash before they would tell you. Outrageous? Certainly. Yet that is what a number of government agencies are doing with the data that we, as taxpayers, pay to have collected on our behalf. You have to pay to get a useful version of that data. Think of Ordnance Survey’s (OS) mapping data: useful to any business that wanted to provide a service in the UK, yet out of reach of startup companies without deep pockets.

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http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1726229,00.html

If you want to beat Google at their own game, you let Ordnance Survey free all of its data for British companies, and let them get on with it…but this is a subset of the principle; when you pay for something, it must belong to you, or be accounted for to you or both. HMG does none of this, and treats you like its slave. You have no rights to the fruits of your labor and no avenue of redress.

That is not right.

And of course, this goes across everything, not the least of which is the spending of your money on the war machine.

Did you know that simple text lists detailing every school in the UK are held by the government, but you cannot have access to them because private sector companies rent these lists and the government is forbidden from competing with them?

This means that even though you have payed for the government to compile and store these lists, they are not allowed to supply you with copies; you have to go to a list dealer and pay £8000 to RENT the list of all schools in the UK.

I’m not making this up.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 9th, 2006 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Politricks.