CivicAccess - Re: Free Our Data Campaing UK + New Guardian Article

Mar 23, 2006; 1:21pm

This is amazing. Jo Walsh wrote to alert the people on the list of
geo-discuss about it too:
http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/geo-discuss/2006-March/000142.html

He makes a very interesting point:

"""
  Noncommercial means that public geodata won't be able to generate
  added economic value through reuse. The late Peter Weiss' study on
  pricing public sector information is very strong on this point:
  http://www.primet.org/documents/Weiss%20-%20Borders%20in%20Cyberspace.htm

  Economic Potential of PSI in Europe and US
  In EUROs	    EU		    US
  Investment value  9.5 billion	    19 billion
  Economic value    68 billion	    750 billion
"""
(PSI here stands for Public Sector Information)

This to me is a very strong argument for making data free, even for
commercial uses. 750 Billion in economic activity should raise enough
taxes to recoup the investment by a wide margin. Even dividing these
numbers by 10 to reflect the Canadian economy's size, we could assume
following the US example would produce EUR 75- 6.8 (say, 7) = EUR 68
Billion dollars. That's how much economic growth we're missing out on
because of counter-productive cost-recovery policies. (We're not 1/10
of Europe, the growth is not automatic, etc... there's a lot of
factors but still, even if it's off by a wide margin, that's a LOT of
money).

For those of you interested in such matters, Jo is trying to round
people up to work on geodata licensing.

Cheers,

Daniel.

On 3/23/06, Tracey P. Lauriault [hidden email] wrote: