Four months after Guardian Technology launched the Free Our Data campaign, a meeting in London on a sweltering Monday evening firmly settled at least one question: are people really interested in public-sector information policy? The fact that at least 130 interested people packed the lecture theatre at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts suggests that the answer is yes....
Since March, Guardian Technology has campaigned for the government to stop charging individuals, businesses and other public bodies to access and re-use non-personal information collected by government organisations. We argue that free access to data would benefit democracy and public accountability, and that the immediate - but comparatively small - loss in revenue to government organisations that sell that data (often to each other) would be more than made up by taxes generated by private-sector companies and people working in a newly stimulated knowledge economy.
At the debate, Paul Crake, programme director of the RSA, and Charles Arthur, editor of Guardian Technology, made this case to open proceedings. Professor David Vaver, director of Oxford University's Intellectual Property Research Centre, put the argument into a historical context - of a long tradition of government attempts to control the printed word, both for censorship and to guarantee authenticity (even of books like the Bible, initially) stretching back to the first printing press in England. The Crown's assumed retention of copyright contrasts with the US government's tradition, which assumes free public access. One consequence, Vaver said, is a potential conflict of interest: when government owns copyright, it has an asset it will always be tempted to turn into money, and that temptation may clash with a policy of free access....
Some participants had good news for our campaign. When the Office for National Statistics made data freely available through a "click use" licence, usage mushroomed, said Keith Dunmore. Natalie Ceeney, the chief executive of the National Archives, said that making census data available at the cost of reproduction had created a huge genealogy market.
If there was a consensus in the hall, it was that the Free Our Data campaign will not be easily won. Even modest suggestions generated vigorous repartee....
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.
