Proceedings of the Workshop on Promoting Access to Scientific and Technical Data for the Public Interest An Assessment of Policy Options (1999) / Chapter Skim
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9 Commerical-Sector Data
9 Commerical-Sector Data
Pages 170-185
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From page 170... ...
is to identify and discuss the principal benefits and opportunities to your database production or dissemination activities from the current legal policy regime. Try to rank them in order of importance.
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From page 171... ...
First, on the supply side of our weather information in the United States, ~ would say that the principal benefit is the policy that the National Weather Service has had of providing a defined external interface that allows private corporations access to information in a defined way. It allows the Weather Service freedom to alter their own operations without altering the interface and allows us to get data in a predictable way, and then to add value and disseminate them.
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From page 172... ...
We were very concerned because a lot of our content comes from primary publishers and, in fact, we had a cooperative arrangement with them at that time for this pilot to actually deliver their full text as well as our bibliographic database. We were very cognizant of the primary publishers in that we were doing a small pilot delivering full text, and that really made us go the extra yard.
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From page 173... ...
It is the intent of the agreement that they will redistribute. In other cases, the intent of the agreement is that they are going to use it only for their own internal purposes~naybe integrate it into their own flight operations, if it is an aviation organization or something like that.
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From page 174... ...
As these scientists increasingly-are getting involved in their own commercial companies and using the work that was funded by the government as the foundation for the initial products of those companies, ~ think it is going to be a greater issue.
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What specific conduct on the part of others most adversely impacts your organization's database activities? In answering this question consider the impacts on your data activities caused by other database producers, data product disseminators, and data users.
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From page 176... ...
Being a start-up company that lives off venture capital funding and private investment makes a very different sort of playing field for us in what we can afford to charge for our products and the kind of access we can provide. If, for example, ~ could have exclusive rights to commercialize all the work done by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBl)
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From page 177... ...
It allows the monopolists to decide whether they will license the information or whether they will choose to keep the information and add value on their own, again causing ripple effects and diminishing competition downstream.
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What ~ care about, because ~ am in the tofu business, is the percentage of vegetarian meals that a restaurant has available on its menu so that ~ can, in combination with data that ~ have acquired lawfully from other sources, crank my sales force up, use the proprietary information, and target my tofu team on going to the right places. So, if you are the producer of that restaurant review database, what ~ do with what turns out to be field 12 out of 22 fields in what ~ bought from you is not competitive at all.
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From page 179... ...
For example, there is a small cottage industry that takes Census Bureau data and puts it onto CDs and makes them available on the Web. If the Census Bureau moves more and more and they have been doing that to make it easier for people to access a particular piece of data on the Web, that is going to compete, but where do they stop in fulfilling their mission?
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From page 180... ...
~ have heard many people-from the Vice President down to the director of the National Weather Service down to the local weather forecaster say that we want to make as much data available as broadly as possible within the constraints posed by our budgets. Until the advent of the Internet, if the National Weather Service wanted to think about disseminating its satellite data or its weather radar data, it would have had to make really big investments in communications.
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From page 181... ...
MS. SINGER: Our data users are usually researchers or authors of information or both, in the corporate and academic environment, and we do everything we can to enable them to download data appropriately from our database.
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From page 182... ...
Some of these are business decisions and ~ guess you make some of your maps available for free in hopes that it will lead to other business down the line. But ~ wanted to ask whether you feel if you were more certain of legal protection could you foresee possibly developing products that are smaller products that you could sell without going through the same arrangements that are not worth making available now because the licensing aspect of it makes them economically unfeasible?
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From page 183... ...
Government data used to be made available in raw form but were not easy to access or easy to understand. With the technological changes being what they are now, however, it becomes easier for those data to be accessed on a very wide basis and maybe, with technology, even to be enhanced substantially when you are talking about summarizers, automated indexing, translation routines, what have you.
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From page 184... ...
Database producers will not have as much economic incentive to do these kinds of value-added customized services because they will be able to make more money just from selling the raw data. Moreover, that kind of increased level of protection will make it more difficult, arguably, for the customizers to get the data that they are customizing.
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From page 185... ...
MS. SINGER: I am leery about going forward without copyright protection even though we have very stringent licensing, especially around the world.
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