[euopendata] Study says charge for public data...

Thu Jan 13 16:22:57 UTC 2011

If a public organisation wants to make some data openly available, my view is that their best strategy is to make it free for anyone, regardless of whether it is used commercially.

(DIsclosure: I run a privately-held startup company helping organisations to publish their data.  However, we don't currently produce commercial services around using or processing or repackaging public data).

The first reason is a pragmatic one - it is quite difficult to make a clear distinction between commercial and non-commercial uses and probably expensive to administer the process of collecting licence fees.

The second is that if a company is offering a commercial service around public data, they must be adding some useful value to it (or the user of their service would just get the data free direct from the public source).  It seems to me a good thing that useful or desirable services of this sort are created and there is no reason why they should not charge people for it, even if they are using open data as part of the service.  They are not charging people for free data, they are charging people for the value their service or product adds to it.

Whilst commercial pricing depends of course on things like perceived value and the level of competition, not simply on costs plus a profit margin - nonetheless if the commercial organisation has to pay for the data, one way or another they will pass this cost on to the users of the service.

Ignoring for now the case where the data is created in one country and used in another, that means that the taxpayers of the country are paying twice - once for the data to be collected and another time in order to use it (via some company's commercial service).

From the viewpoint of the organisation publishing the data, their objective is presumably (in most cases) to make their data as useful as possible.  Commercial intermediaries between the 'raw' data and the end users of the data add another means of distributing it and so contribute to the benefits to be gained by the data publisher.

Getting a little more abstract, what is really the difference between (1) a commercial company using the data to make a useful service which their customers pay for, and (2) a research institution bidding for funding to use the data in some kind of research project?  In the research case, the 'customer' of the institution is a tax-payer funded organisation that concludes they are adding some value to the data they use and is willing to pay them to do it.  Sounds a lot like case (1).