Lars Aronsson wrote:
Elly Waterman wrote:
In the Netherlands, most GIS data are owned by publicly funded organisations, but cannot be used freely. To the contrary these data a very expensive.
This is the case in most of Europe. The issue is discussed on the EGIP mailing list (European Geographic Information Policy), http://www.ec-gis.org/egip/
From that, I can't seem to figure out if the issue is an access one (we can't get the data) or a legal one (we're not allowed to use the data). If the latter, I think we can safely ignore it, at least in the US: a simple database of factual data is not copyrightable in the US, so once we can our hands on it, we can do whatever we want with it, regardless of what the person who put the data together says we can do with it.
-Mark