While the Government of Canada should not have copyright at all, there are some specific types of works that should at least be released in a liberal copyright license. One example is state-collected geospatial data. There is a electronic petition hosted by the Open Knowledge Foundation Network (OKFN) that states that state-collected geodata should be openly available to citizens. I believe that Canadians need to include this issue in letters that they write politicians so that they recognize that reform (or abolishing) of Crown Copyright needs to be part of the shorter-term copyright issues to be dealt with. This issue has a personal side to me. The Masters Thesis of a close friend, Charles LaPierre, was a Personal Navigation System for the Visually Impaired. This involved the use of a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, a computer that did voice synthesis, and a software and map that could tell visually impaired people where they were. The existence of Crown Copyright, as well as the excessive costs and conservative licensing of government owned data, made doing this project far less feasible in Canada than in the United States. While there are many different reasons for a brain-drain of entrepreneurial Canadians to the US, it is important for Canadians to realize that Crown Copyright is one of those causes.
(PS: I encourage OAN readers to sign the OKFN petition. For more details, see my blog posting on it from August 21.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/17/2005 01:45:00 PM.
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.
