[Freegis-list] INSPIRE directive on the way to enforce copyright on state-collected geo data

[Jo Walsh]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 11:22:32AM +0100, oceatoon at gmail.com wrote:
> Here's my 2 cents on all this and I apologise in advance if some 
> organisations feel concerned but they should anyway.
> Starting a petition is necessary for Inspire and all other OS projects , 
> but first maybe we could write once again why geoData must be public 
> domain in Europe because The Council really seem think headed and don't 
> seem to understand the prejudice caused by closing all this info into 
> the private sector:

http://okfn.org/geo/manifesto.php was my attempt, with a lot of help
from Rufus Pollock and the people on the geo-discuss list at OKFN and
the openstreetmap list, to state in a constructive way, why access to
state-collected geodata should be free. It doesn't directly address
INSPIRE, but was written with it in the background.
500+ people have signed it, from all over the world, most of them GIS
professionals, hackers and academics. I suspect many of them would be
inspired to help with a narrower more focused effort at this point.

I think there has been a feeling that INSPIRE has too many "stakes in
the ground" to have a chance of rejection; that the GIS specific
issues are too niche for enough people to care about to get enough
MEPs to listen carefully; that the strong rhetoric about caring
sharing of environmental data that prefaces INSPIRE is hard to penetrate.
but i think http://eurogeographics.org/ used to say a lot more definite 
stuff about INSPIRE than it does now; it could be weakening.  

"Copyfighters" who don't know from jack about GIS or the significance
of open access to geodata, *do* however care about restrictive and
unexamined use of copyright in ways that restrict the flow of civic
information. The software patents directive campaign did amazingly
well in a short time - they found ways both to speak to the hearts of
individuals and address the very genuine commercial concerns of many
small/medium business about impact on their revenues and innovative
practises. Benjamin was heavily involved in that success.

> Maybe we could also start a list of european axed open source projects 
> where we could say why not having a european  database is pulling the 
> hand break on our projects.

openstreetmap.org has a lot of pan-European open mapping activity now.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/wiki/index.php/OpenStreetMap:Community_Portal 


-jo