Resources > United States of America

• Dr. Harlan J. Onsrud has authored many articles on Legal and Information Policy Issues. He teaches Information Systems Law at the University of Maine Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering.

  His paper Tragedy of the Information Commons discusses the effects of the local governments charging for data to maintain their bargaining power. This can lead to a gradual escalation, freezing out the general public.

• The StreetCD 99 is just one example of the kind of spatial data available in the USA. It contains a complete network of all roads and streets, railways, many admin boundaries, as well as a water features for the whole country. It is sold by a private company which has reprocessed free US Census data into 100 'easy to use' layers, compressed onto one CD.

  List price is US$500.00, and there is a 40% discount for academic, government and non-profit organizations. What would this cost in Canada ?

• RIGHTS IN GOVERNMENT-GENERATED DATA is a scholarly article by Jessica Litman, Professor of Law at Wayne State University, investigating the balance of copyright against data ownership. It argues:

  that facts and information belong in the public domain, and that, in any event, information generated by the government should be freely available for everybody's unrestricted use. In legal terms, that means that the law should (and I would argue that current law does) provide that the government cannot effectively sell exclusive rights in data it generates, because it has, and should have, no exclusive rights to assign.

  Although this article relies partly on the American Constitution, its arguments about democracy and the function of government are very applicable to our situation.

  The above is one of many papers from the PROCEEDINGS OF THE CONFERENCE ON LAW AND INFORMATION POLICY FOR SPATIAL DATABASES in 1994.

• The Summer 1999 edition of ESRI's Arc News magazine carried an article Canadians launch free data initiative (82 KB JPG) about this website.
• The Executive Branch of the US Federal government, from the White House, has a clear policy on data charges in its MEMORANDUM FOR HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND ESTABLISHMENTS on the subject of Management of Federal Information Resources . It includes the following in section 8. Policy:

  7. Avoiding Improperly Restrictive Practices. Agencies shall:

  (a) Avoid establishing, or permitting others to establish on their behalf, exclusive, restricted, or other distribution arrangements that interfere with the availability of information dissemination products on a timely and equitable basis;

  (b) Avoid establishing restrictions or regulations, including the charging of fees or royalties, on the reuse, resale, or redissemination of Federal information dissemination products by the public; and,

  (c) Set user charges for information dissemination products at a level sufficient to recover the cost of dissemination but no higher. They shall exclude from calculation of the charges costs associated with original collection and processing of the information. Exceptions to this policy are:

  (i) Where statutory requirements are at variance with the policy;

  (ii) Where the agency collects, processes, and disseminates the information for the benefit of a specific identifiable group beyond the benefit to the general public;

  (iii) Where the agency plans to establish user charges at less than cost of dissemination because of a determination that higher charges would constitute a significant barrier to properly performing the agency's functions, including reaching members of the public whom the agency has a responsibility to inform; or

  (iv) Where the Director of OMB determines an exception is warranted.

• Policy Statements for Federal Geographic Data Sharing (Adobe Acrobat - 5KB) (June, 1992) by United States Federal Geospatial Data Committee, which includes the following :

"Agencies should set use charges for data products at a level sufficient to recover the cost of dissemination but no higher. They also exclude from the calculation of the charges costs associated with the original collection and processing of the data."

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