newt

Intellectual property produced by the Government should be license-free. The citizenry has already paid for it. It has been produced using facilities owned and operated by us. Slapping a copyright statement on it and restricting its distribution amounts to intellectual property theft, which, funnily enough, is precisely the kind of thing that DBCDE gets upset about whenever the movie studios and music labels have a word in their ear. Faux-commercialization of Government entities has been one of the worst bits of rot that has set in over the last 30 years. The public service is supposed to be for public service. If there's a public need for information, it should be produced with tax dollars and made available to tax dollars. If there's a private need for the same information, either let private industry justify it as a public good that's performed on the same basis as everything else the public service does, or let the private sector sort it out for themselves. Take careful note: The "additional legal and administrative work and costs ... involved in identifying relevant datasets," could be completely eliminated by setting a Government-wide policy of providing read-only access to ALL non-classified Government-produced datasets. The Internet makes this easy, and where it's difficult for historical reasons systems should be redesigned to make it easy. Other nations seem to understand this: In the USA, Government documents are uncopyrightable. The same should apply here.