James Boyle, Public information wants to be free, Financial Times, February 24, 2005. Excerpt: 'Take publicly generated data, the huge and hugely important flow of information produced by government-funded activities - from ordnance survey maps and weather data, to state-produced texts, traffic studies and scientific information. How is this flow of information distributed? The norm turns out to be very different in the US and in Europe. On one side of the Atlantic, state produced data flows are frequently viewed as potential revenue sources. They are copyrighted or protected by database rights. The departments which produce the data often attempt to make a profit from user-fees, or at least recover their entire operating costs. It is heresy to suggest that the taxpayer has already paid for the production of this data and should not have to do so again. The other side of the Atlantic practices a benign form of information socialism. By law, any text produced by the central government is free from copyright and passes immediately into the public domain. Unoriginal compilations of fact - public or private - may not be owned. As for government data, the basic norm is that it should be available at the cost of reproduction alone. It is easy to guess which is which. Surely, the United States is the profit and property-obsessed realm, Europe the place where the state takes pride in providing data as a public service? No, actually it is the other way around....The European attitude may be changing. Competition policy has already been a powerful force pushing countries to rethink their attitudes to government data. The European Directive on the re-use of public sector information takes strides in the right direction, as do several national initiatives. Unfortunately, though, most of these follow a disappointing pattern. An initially strong draft is watered down and the utterly crucial question of whether data must be provided at the marginal cost of reproduction is fudged or avoided.'
Update. See Richard Epstein's response to Boyle's article. Excerpt: 'James Boyle’s informative column on databases is right to point out the advantages of the free flow of basic information collected by government sources. But it is also critical to understand that the implicit trade-offs behind this calculation apply not only to data but to all forms of intellectual property, which can be either privately owned or placed in the public domain....It is, also, I think important to remember that a regime of public domain information is not a form of "socialism", benign or otherwise. Socialism champions the collective ownership of the means of production, which might describe the European control over its data. The public domain connotes no collective control over information or anything else. Each person can use what he or she will, no questions asked....[T]he case for putting information in the public domain seems a lot stronger [than the analogous case for patentable inventions]. Data is of great value is in the use of other commercial endeavours. Open access allows individual firms to collate the data in ways that might command a premium, while leaving others access to the raw materials. That's the approach taken with the human genome, and it seems to work here. It is nice to know that the United States has done something right. Let's hope that the European Union sees the light on this one.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/25/2005 09:29:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
