OPEN

So, you pay your taxes. The Government funds innovative research with some of that. Said research’s fruits draw attention and admiration and people express an interest in using them. the research team would love to let people do just that, but they can’t.

Why? The publicly-funded scandal of Crown Copyright.

One of the Guardian Technology section’s lead stories today is about the University of London 3D mapping project reported on Open… last week. As Charles Arthur, editor of Guardian Technology pointed out in a comment to that post:

It’s a classic, and classically stupid, bind that “crown copyright” creates. Which is why the Free Our Data campaign (http://www.freeourdata.org.uk) keeps going on about it. It would be so nice if other people realised how shortchanged we are by the requirement for the OS to make a “profit” – by restricting the public’s wider use of mapping data that we could all benefit from.

There is a moral dimension to all of this, of course: we pay for the creation of this intellectual property – let us have access, please.

But then there is also big lesson from the flat world / open web / crowdsourcing concept and what it can do with data: more than any single organisation or Government.

Professor Hans Rosling has shown how powerful it can be when individuals and private organsiations can play with rich sources of data in his Gapminder project which has used UN data to deliver fresh and compelling insights into how our world is developing (see his TED presentation for an example of this).

I fear that the UK Government may take a long time to change and adapt to new opportunities that the web is bringing us.

But maybe if enough people back this campaign – with a new leader about to take over from tony Blair and an opposition hungry to prove its modern credentials perhaps there is a window for one of them to move quickly to demonstrate their understanding of the web.

Meantime, head over to www.freeourdata.org.uk/blog and add your voice to the discussion…

If you’re reading about this outside the UK, how does your state behave with the data and innovations that you’ve paid for, that would be much more useful in the public domain rather than trapped in bureaucracy?