Following up from a post the other day, here’s another example of public money being used to create something, but the public (who funded the development through their taxes) not being allowed to use the result for free:
Wikileaks is hosting a copy of the “all 1,841,177 post codes together with precise geographic coordinates and other information” for the UK.
One odd thing about Britain is that databases produced at public expense — maps of the country, lists of postal codes, transcripts of Parliamentary debate and so on — do not belong to the public. In order to use this data, you have to pay gigantic licensing fees to the government, who accordingly threatens to sue people who use them without permission.
