Small print
Governments (federal, state, local) within the US generally remain opposed to the idea of PublicData.com and look for ways to discourage general public access to Public Records (simply put, governments view this as a loss of their power and control). It is common for opportunistic politicians or bureaucrats to jump onto manufactured stories of a criminal element using information from PublicData.com to perpetrate a crime. These “keepers of the public trust” are motivated by their own quest for power by duping the public into demanding that access to Public Records be restricted. Now to be sure, criminals have used PublicData.com but we work very aggressively with law enforcement to help assure conviction.
We remain dedicated to the idea that all citizens of our free society should have access to all of the records that government collects (except information critical to national security and information involved in ongoing criminal investigation). Likewise we will continue to lead the industry in “low cost” real-time access to Public Records. We will continue to add to the number of database offerings while providing better performance and more value. PublicData.com purchases all of its data from various government entities (directly and indirectly) and is in no way subsidized by any government.
INSPIRE is the Proposed European Commission Directive on European Spatial Data Infrastucture. Its website is here: http://inspire.jrc.it/
INSPIRE is the most recent in a long series of attempted EC Directives that have tried to establish a common framework for annotating and sharing geographic data between member states – a spatial data infrastructure. It emphasises the environmental reasons to share data between official agencies in different EC countries, rather than focusing on access to that data as a way of promoting wider involvement in civic issues.
INSPIRE also describes a set of implementing rules that member states MUST follow, except INSPIRE doesn’t describe these implementing rules; it just says that Member States will be obliged to follow them, once they are decided on. Given that the National mapping agencies have significant vested interests in applying copyright to their geospatial data, and influence in parliament, this is a potentially worrying aspect of the directive.
The InspireTimeline shows some key events in the life of INSPIRE as it has gone through the EU co-decision process. During its lifetime it has acquired an increased emphasis on licensing and copyright, even for viewing of data, and the essential data sets that it’s meant to cover have slowly been dropping away.
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The InspireTimeline illustrates how some of the language has changed as it goes through the EU legislative process.
Why act on Inspire?
This site hopes to inspire anyone in Europe who considers themself to have a stake in GeographicInformation, no matter how small, to be able to get involved in the European lobbying process that surrounds the InspireDirective.
Giving copyright over public data collected at taxpayers expense to the NationalMappingAgencies who collect it will have a negative effect on the profitability and innovation of industry, academic, local government and open-source software groups who have not been consulted.
If you care about European citizens’ ability to participate in the GeospatialWebBoom that is driving social and economic activity in the US and Canada right now; even if you like the idea that NationalMappingAgencies such as the UK’s OrdnanceSurvey should be granted intellectual property rights and copyright on geographic data that you paid to help collect in the first place, this site hopes to help you to ActOnInspire.
WhatIsInspire really trying to achieve? It’s been created through a non-transparent process of consultation with the NationalMappingAgencies who have collected geodata on behalf of governments at tax-payers’ expense, and are now trying to gain copyright and intellectual property rights over that geodata, in order to sell it back to small businesses, academics and citizens to “recover their costs”.
