a nationalised company isn't owned by the citizens but by the entity that serves as the nation.
also, information being publicly available doesn't necessarily give anyone the right to recreate/redistribute it.
the NMBS has every right to have this redistribution of it's data shut down, but it's tremendously silly to do so and if brought to court, I doubt they'd even win.
imo, tuinslak should show some spine and tell them to take it to court.
So who makes up the entity that serves as the nation, if it isn't the people?
I do hope he makes them take it to court, and I've offered to help make that happen -- one of the primary ways that entities like NMBS get away with bullshit takedown requests is by making it too expensive for victims to be able to defend themselves successfully, but fortunately we have organisations like the EFF whose mission statement is to help people establish viable defences against just these sorts of overbroad claims.
In fairness, being a citizen, or even a stock holder in a corporation, doesn't give you the same rights to the property owned by the country or corporation that you would have over your own property. I can't just borrow my town's cop car because it belongs to be in a philosophical sense.
But yeah, intellectual 'property' claims by a Public company on redistributing information that is already freely available doesn't actually serve any purpose. IP law is just broken in this case. I'd think that any 'ip' created by the government or a public entity should automatically be public domain.
It's encouraging to see that in the US, public funding institutions like the NIH are going the way of openness. Journal articles funded by NIH money must now be made available via PubMed Central within twelve months of publication, under the NIH's Public Access Policy, which is pretty awesome -- and PMC also encourages (and provides infrastructure for) authors to make their data available to the public, which is even better.
This is very recent you know. It all happened under Clinton. Before his administration any library, even the most public, the most open ones, had to pay through the nose in order to get nearly any US taxpayer funded info out to the taxpayer again, through public or academic library access.
Wow, it's really taken them a while to get a critical mass of data out there, then. It wasn't until sometime in the last two or three years that I started noticing a large number of papers in PubMed with the "free full text" link. They seem to be working backward in time, though, which is cool.
also, information being publicly available doesn't necessarily give anyone the right to recreate/redistribute it.
the NMBS has every right to have this redistribution of it's data shut down, but it's tremendously silly to do so and if brought to court, I doubt they'd even win.
imo, tuinslak should show some spine and tell them to take it to court.
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I do hope he makes them take it to court, and I've offered to help make that happen -- one of the primary ways that entities like NMBS get away with bullshit takedown requests is by making it too expensive for victims to be able to defend themselves successfully, but fortunately we have organisations like the EFF whose mission statement is to help people establish viable defences against just these sorts of overbroad claims.
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But yeah, intellectual 'property' claims by a Public company on redistributing information that is already freely available doesn't actually serve any purpose. IP law is just broken in this case. I'd think that any 'ip' created by the government or a public entity should automatically be public domain.
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