The Open Society
The Economist has published a special report on managing information that contains an article titled: The open society - Governments are letting in the light.
The article reviews the actions Governments across the world are taking with respect to public sector information. The article uses examples from the United States and compares with other parts of the world including Europe.
The article refers to the European Union Public Sector Information re-use Directive 2003/98/EC and states:
“Other parts of the world are also beginning to move to greater openness. A European Commission directive in 2005 called for making public-sector information more accessible (but it has no bite). Europe’s digital activists use the web to track politicians and to try to improve public services. In Britain FixMyStreet.com gives citizens the opportunity to flag up local problems. That allows local authorities to find out about people’s concerns; and once the problem has been publicly aired it becomes more difficult to ignore.”
The article also considers the obstacles that prevail and the UK Crown Copyright regime is cited. The article states:
“An obstacle of a different sort is Crown copyright, which means that most government data in Britain and the Commonwealth countries are the state’s property, constraining their use. In Britain postcodes and Ordnance Survey map data at present cannot be freely used for commercial purposes—a source of loud complaints from businesses and activists. But from later this year access to some parts of both data sets will be free, thanks to an initiative to bring more government services online.”
The article then goes on to highlight that it is not all sweet and rosy in the USA with respect to public sector information and states:
“But even in America access to some government information is restricted by financial barriers. Remarkably, this applies to court documents, which in a democracy should surely be free. Legal records are public and available online from the Administrative Office of the US Courts (AOUSC), but at a costly eight cents per page. Even the federal government has to pay: between 2000 and 2008 it spent $30m to get access to its own records. Yet the AOUSC is currently paying $156m over ten years to two companies, WestLaw and LexisNexis, to publish the material online (albeit organised and searchable with the firms’ technologies). Those companies, for their part, earn an estimated $2 billion annually from selling American court rulings and extra content such as case reference guides. “The law is locked up behind a cash register,” says Mr Malamud.
The two firms say they welcome competition, pointing to their strong search technology and the additional services they provide, such as case summaries and useful precedents. It seems unlikely that they will keep their grip for long. One administration official privately calls freeing the information a “no-brainer”. Even Google has begun to provide some legal documents online.”
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