Thoughts on GI and the Digital Economy Act 2010

As is my wont, I think it's time to ask some questions on this new act and what it might mean for us in our day to day working. I see two main areas of influence for us to consider; public wi-fi and proof of creation.

The first may not be your concern if you are not in the ICT section of your Organisation, however you may be using a wifi connection at a partner site yourself. In this case, you have to think about not just what you are doing for work, but also what you are also doing for your home life.  Suppose you open an email forwarded from a friend which, unbeknownst to either of you contains a video that has been withdrawn. Sometimes the withdrawal is by the same company who uploaded it, so you have no way of knowing if this may happen. The wifi you are using, may then be turned off at the request of that same company. Won't that be rather embarrassing?

Secondly, and I feel more relevantly, we all use the same software, which has standard thematic maps to go with our shared public raw data. If one of these maps goes into a book, how can you then prove you didn't copy it if challenged without going through a very arduous and costly process? We have all been talking about what happened when our freely given address information got copyrighted by the Royal Mail for their aggregation effort, and then again by the OS for the initial georeferencing of the file. Let's not walk blindly into a duplicate situation. Asserting your Intellectual Property Rights doesn't mean charging necessarily, it just means your effort must be recognised when the data is reused, and this must be with your consent once fair use clauses have been exceeded.

We in GI must sadly start to think now about where the free data is going, and what is being done with it. Can we talk to the raw data providers about copyright clauses that stipulate copyright can only be enforced on their raw data if significant work has been done to it? And if so, what's significant?