If geospatial information is free who will pay for its creation and maintenance?
It seems to be conventional wisdom in library, academic and business circles that government produced information like geospatial data should be freely available and that the benefits to the economy will more than pay for the cost of the data creation and management. In his article “The True Cost of Spatial Data in Canada” Brian Klinkenberg makes the case that the restriction and fee system of Canadian geospatial information impedes research and economic growth and reinforces class distinctions by creating information haves and have-nots according to who can afford to access and benefit from greater access to geospatial information. He lays the blame for the current system and its problems on the Crown Copyright system and argues that this system should be dropped, as New Zealand has done, in favor of a US based system where there is no copyright on government information. I agree that the current system in Canada is not ideal; however, I don’t believe that the differences between the US and Canada have been fully considered in the article. For example, the significance differences in population and land area. The cost per person of producing geospatial data is huge in comparison to the US. The Canadian tax base is so much smaller while the land area is proportionally speaking immense. Canada will never be able to map its land to the same scale that the US has. Also, due to the more equally distributed wealth in the population and higher taxes, the labour costs of creating and maintaining the geospatial data is also much higher than in the US. New Zealand, which Klinkenberg uses as an example of how Canada could jettison Crown Copyright, is a much smaller country and with a proportionally larger population to its land area. Particularly, given the current political climate in Canada of budget cuts, shrinking government, and lowering taxes, where is the political will and budget for funding geospatial data creation and low cost (or free) dispersion? Even in the US, corporations that benefit from free access to geospatial data created by the government, do not want to pay taxes and fund the government institutions and employees who create this information. Whether a company pays for the information through taxes or by paying for the product through a fee system, someone needs to pay.
