[Geowanking] Re: GeoDRM

[Lars Aronsson]

Josh at oklieb wrote:

> One of the (few) benefits of having used the term GeoDRM for the 
> present geo-rights work is that it does flush out people who are 
> mainly looking for a demon to hunt and use abusive language 
> rather than actually talking and thinking about how intellectual 
> property rights work for all Web users.

This is utter nonsense.  You're making believe that we're all born 
yesterday and that this is a theoretical issue with no history or 
built-in conflicts.  As if, well, here's John Doe and he has some 
data, and now Jane wants to use it. La la la la la.

That's not the case in geodata.  What we have is a bunch of 
European national government agencies that for centuries gathered 
geodata, paid for by the tax payers, and now they are selling it 
by the minute as if they were a private entity that owned it.  
While in fact we, the people, own them.

Open geodata is all about opening up what now is closed.  Not only 
the data itself is closed, but because of this young programmers 
are also closed from developing their creativity in the GIS field, 
since they have almost no free geodata to play around with.  Any 
DRM scheme is just a means for those agencies to keep a lock on 
the data.  Some users might look at it, but cannot touch it.

The newspeak of OGC is out to misrepresent this issue completely, 
and this is harmful.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se