[Opengenalliance] old bailey proceedings

Jim Killock jim at openrightsgroup.org
Mon May 16 19:26:32 BST 2011


Hi Guy

Just my views!

On 16 May 2011, at 18:06, Guy Etchells wrote:

> I agree Public Records should be free to view at the archive but see no need for the extra expense of providing public records in an individuals home.

The reason that "open" models may be in principle better when free (in cost and licensing) for the end user is purely pragmatic. 

There are two strands to this:

(i) Free in cost can be produced without cost to the taxpayer, if a third party wishes to supply the data; and over time this will be increasingly true, as data costs continue to plummet. If third parties are allowed to redistribute this therefore lowers costs to the taxpayer.

(ii) Free in licensing means that new datasets and results can be created from the original at low cost. Imagine you wish to combine say, weather data, marriage data and tax data. The reasons might be obvious, such as knowing the weather on your ancestor's marriage date, or obscure, such as researching some correlations. But license and price barriers may prevent this, or reduce the incentives, especially if the incentives are set to supplying just simple parts of this data for license fees. Or the cheap way may be prevented in favour of access and processing only by licensed multinationals.


At the moment, the danger is that the state may be setting up private data monopolies, at the expense of the taxpayer, the hobbyist and the innovator. While this may not be the intention of anyone, the policy direction needs to be a bit more spelled out to avoid this as an outcome.

Hope that helps,

Jim


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