[akudha]

How does one decide what should be in the public domain for the good of society and what should be commercialized? These are a couple of examples that I learned recently

1. In the UK, Royal Mail owns the postal addresses data. I was looking at UK's open datasets - apparently lot of datasets that have addresses can't be used without paying Royal Mail. There are some exceptions - but I am no lawyer. It is depressing to learn that Royal Mail is no longer a public institution, it was sold against public will by the UK government to a private entity, and sold again and as of last year it is owned by a Czech billionaire. Similarly, Canadian postal code database is also not free.

2. CPT code descriptions are owned by AMA (apparently they're super litigious?). Sure they took the time to write them, they should be compensated - but imagine how many interesting projects can be built if this data was freely available

On one hand, multi Billion dollar companies like Bloomberg exist, thanks to free and open data. But also things that should be free (dictionaries, postal codes etc) aren't.

[AlotOfReading]

It's not a question of "how do you decide which public standards should be freely accessible". That's easy: all of them. The public benefits more from freely accessible standards whether they're building codes, legal codes, ISO standards, or HDMI. The effect of not having them publicly available is that people make-do without having read the standard and the public has no way to validate things against the standard afterwards.

The question we don't have an easy answer for is how to incentivise the people behind these things without locking their work behind paywalls? Compliance marks, homologation regimes, copyright, and other strategies all have their own downsides.

[doctorpangloss]

Do you think it’s good for UpToDate that OpenEvidence scrapes and paraphrases UpToDate and sells the same information in a GPT wrapper to make big investor bucks? I don’t know what the answer is. Go for it, tell me.