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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | RE: GISList: 2000 Census Data and Fees |
| Date: |
09/24/2001 01:51:38 PM |
| From: |
Dimitri Rotow |
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>
> Does anyone know details on the 2000 Census data and the
> reselling of it?
> For instance, royalties, different type of license when
> purchasing the data.
>
> How does it work if the data is downloaded off the Internet,
> bought from the
> US Census Bureau or bought from a data provider who has already made the
> data easier to use?
>
>
Data downloaded from US Bureau of the Census sites or acquired on CD from
the Bureau is in the public domain. You can do whatever you want with it.
It's a more difficult legal and ethical question when you get the same data
from a private vendor. If the data is protected only by copyright, there
have been court cases recently that one cannot copyright a compilation even
if it has been "organized". My personal view is that as a matter of ethics
if you have purchased something from a vendor where it was placed in a more
usable form you should respect their limitations on usage even if it is
legal for you not to.
On the other hand, some vendors are breaking copyright law or otherwise
pulling unethical maneuvers by trying to privatize public domain data. If
someone takes public data and slaps a "copyright" on it without any
significant modification then I think it is OK to ignore that. It's illegal
to claim a copyright in something in which you do not have a copyright,
including public domain data. For example, the Census Bureau once published
a "Census Mapper" CD that contained an ESRI claim on the CD that ESRI owned
the code and data on the CD... including the Statistical Abstract of the
United States! Clearly, that's nonsense and should be ignored, since the
StatAb is very much in the public domain.
Exactly where the line is drawn in the range of no modifications at all to
very substantial modifications is one of those gray areas that our legal
system does not address well. See your IP lawyer when in doubt.
If the data is protected by a private contract between you and your supplier
such that no copyright is claimed, then the legal and ethical waters get
muddied. Suppose a person who is clueless about using Internet wants to
get, say, Census 2000 data. So they buy a CD from someone who says they are
only willing to provide the CD if the buyer agrees not to replicate it or to
share the data in any way. Suppose the data on the CD is in the public
domain and was downloaded from the Census Bureau site by the vendor and
otherwise has no modifications.
Is that a valid contract? Is it enforceable? Is it ethical to observe the
contract? Some people would say that if you made an agreement you should
stick to it. Others would say that some types of contracts cannot be formed
in our society even by informed, consenting adults because they are against
society's interests at large. My own guess is that a contract restricting
usage of public domain data would probably be found invalid, because it is
based on a fradulent premise, that the public domain data can be made
someone's private property and thus subject to control.
Cheers,
Dimitri
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