Tim Berners-Lee agrees: our data should be free
I’ve heard from a contributor that in a talk he gave earlier this week, Sir Tim Berners-Lee – you may recall him from films such as “Honey, I invented the World Wide Web” – agrees with the idea that Ordnance Survey data (in particular) should be available to us all, for our use, without cost. We’ll have a full piece about what he said in next week’s Guardian Technology, if you can bear to wait. (Actually, you’ll have to. Sorry.)
The interesting point about Sir Tim, of course, is that he could have patented his work in developing the hypertext protocol (what if CERN had had a requirement that workers’ ideas were patented?) and perhaps made a lot of money – although equally, the Web would not have been taken up with the same excitement if one had had to pay a licence fee for every web page served or link clicked. Sir Tim said as much in 2004 (original article seems to have disappeared.)
The content you’re looking at now is an illustration of how freeing publicly-paid and generated data – in this case, how to implement the hypertext protocol (http to you and me), developed at a taxpayer-funded particle physics laboratory – can lead to individual and commercial implementations whose value far exceeds those that could have been realised by charging.
We’re glad to know that we’re thinking along the same lines as the man who invented the Web. But can anyone think of a counter-example – of patented or copyrighted ideas around data that have been taken up on a huge scale? To win the argument for this campaign, we need to consider any counter-example.
(Note: “patented or” removed in above because we’re not talking about patents in this campaign, but about copyright walls surrounding public data, and want to focus on that. – CA)
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- Today in The Guardian: Berners-Lee talks; who should we be chasing? (23 March 2006; score: 29.78%)
- Sounds like a good idea: Sir Tim Berners-Lee goes to Downing Street to talk open data (15 September 2009; score: 25.15%)
- Tim Berners-Lee to help UK government build single data access point (29 October 2009; score: 21.71%)
- Gordon Brown announces OS maps to be free online (18 November 2009; score: 21.42%)
- Goodbye Gordon Brown: but thanks for the data ... and the campaign goes on (12 May 2010; score: 16.61%)
March 17th, 2006 at 8:34 pm
Hmm… I think you’d be better off keeping patents out of this. The issues surrounding patents relating to the form of information supplied are very different to those relating to copyright on the information itself, and there’s no point in getting into them unless the government is already supplying or proposing to supply data exclusively in such formats. It is easy to provide examples of data structures or formats that have been covered by patents yet taken up on a huge scale*, but if the government /chose/ to supply some data it had acquired on our behalf /only/ in some patent encumbered (or simply closed and proprietary) format, it would be particularly easy to argue that doing so was entirely perverse and could /only/ have the effect of unnecessarily raising costs and stifling innovation.
* IBM has until August to sue you for infringing its LZW patent with your campaign’s GIF logo, but they probably won’t ;-)
March 19th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
I can give you many examples of where the current practices at issue are NOT used and it would clearly be ludicrous to consider using them, so why is the Ordnance Survey and other tradding funds/government agenceis allowed to do so?
Two examples…
Road travel – vehicle owners pay for the upkeep and construction of roads through personal and business taxation, road tax. fuel tax and VAT. If we were to extend the rules under which the Ordnance Survey operates, roadusers would ALSO be charged per Km travelled, by journey time, route taken and by how many people travel in each vehicle.
The BBC – this would be like the BBC charging per viewer/listener for the number of seconds of viewing or listening, AFTER the they have recieved money from the licence fee.
March 20th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany owns the patents for MP3 compression technologies which it licenses for use by commercial organisations through Thomson. Clearly, the MP3 format has been a success in terms of adoption by music producers and consumers. However, it may be worth noting the business model for this licensing which charges producers of equipment capable of playing MP3 files a modest fee – at least that is how I understand it.
I am hard-pressed to think of other similar examples.
Martin De Saulles
March 20th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
I thought that it was MP3 encoding that was charged for – that MP3 decoding is free (ie needs no licence).
Oh, no, I’m wrong: MP3 royalty rates. It does cost.
March 20th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
Audio compression and compression in general are fields sown with innumerable software patent mines, but what on earth has that got to do with this campaign? If you think that patent encumbered information technologies in widespread use provide counter-examples which weaken your arguments supporting free access to publicly funded data collections, then I’ll be happy to provide the O.S. people – and any others – with all the ammunition they could ever wish for and you may as well shut this site down right now. Of course they are /not/ counter-examples, as I have tried to point out. Trust me; you do NOT want to get this laudable campaign mixed up in the dirty and nasty software patent wars.
March 20th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Agreed; patents don’t apply here anyway because we’re not talking about invention. We’re talking about *copyright*.
Perhaps I’ll edit the post.
March 20th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
I agree with the comments made re. patents but I was trying to make a more general point in line with the original posting about Tim Berners Lee and his development of the WWW. This involved the development of a protocol based around an open standard. Anyway, I promise never to mention patents again :-)
March 23rd, 2006 at 9:12 pm
[...] Contrary to earlier reports, Sir Tim seems NOT to be asking for free access to geospatial data… instead, intelligent, feature based geospatial data, rather than simple mapping should be made more accessible. [...]
March 24th, 2006 at 7:40 am
Well now I’m confused. Will someone kindly explain to me exactly what data the O.S. collects and holds and in what forms. What extra processing and product development is O.S. doing with those data and is it really true that TBL is only asking for the (not unreasonably) very restricted access to the APIs of what are primarily commercial products produced by O.S.?