David Cake

Rather than removing crown copyright, I'd like to see public sector information licenced under explicit but broad and open terms, similar to the Creative Commons idea (though a for purpose licence rather than simple CC is probably appropriate). In particular, putting public sector information into the public domain allows for unscrupulous organisations to surreptitiously put it back into copyright -- for example, legal citation monopolies in the USA that are maintained not by copyright on the public domain legal documents themselves, but by copyright on the page numbering. More broadly, I would want to see them licenced so any sort of database copyright has very hard to create or enforce. Cost recovery programs in general do poor job, whether by commercial organisations or the public sector. I'm all in favour of reasonable cost recovery for government agencies actual provision of the data, but not for recovery of the cost of creating the data, which is best left as a public good.