Centerfield

Look, an Untapped Revenue Stream for the Gov't!

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution, one of my indispensable favorites among blogs, for pointing out this article by James Boyle at the Financial times about tapping government data flows as revenue.

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.

I've thought for some time that it made sense for the government to charge for commercial use of information it paid to collect, know-how it paid to create, and so on. Makes sense to me to, say, let non-profit and personal web sites repeat weather data as fair use, but charge for-profit sites a fee. And to not give profitable entities any loopholes because their web site is not profitable per se. It might be really hard to do, though. But it's kind of funny how easy it is to get businesses to like benign socialism depending on whose bread is getting buttered, aint it?

I'm not qualified to address the technical merits of Boyle's economic analysis that suggests giving it away is better, but I'll note that his version of "better" only seems to encompass economic activity and the intrinsic merits of ever more economic activity. It doesn't seem to say anything about getting teased by a partial weather foreceast at 6:03 and then waiting through 2 minutes of blabbity blah just to find out the NWS says it's going to rain tomorrow.