Think & Play
Thoughtplay is the creative team behind various popular websites and other projects. At this blog we give away bright ideas regularly, and comment on interesting trends both online and off. The thought channel is for more business-related trends, play looks at entertainment and leisure, and thoughtplay introduces our own creative ideas, as well as news about our projects.
The tragicomedy of the commons | 041106
The UK's Institute for Public Policy Research has published a report on copyright policy (see Ars Technica for a good summary).
In brief, it says there are four legislative models for intellectual property available, and encouragingly advocates the third:
- all knowledge is private property (US)
- knowledge is primarily private property, but some has public ownership (UK at present)
- knowledge is public property first, and secondarily a private asset (eg academic research papers)
- knowledge should be entirely a public resource (eg open source software)
Whether the mapping community would agree with this analysis is moot: the US offers its mapping data to the public domain, whereas the Ordnance Survey in the UK is notoriously litigious, and the Royal Mail overprotective of its postcode data.
Projects such as OpenStreetMap and the New Popular Edition Maps are thankfully trying to liberate cartography here too.
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