The UK Government has announced its intention to explore ways of making all Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April. The Free Our Data campaign has worked for over three years to convince the government to “abandon copyright on essential national data, making it freely available to anyone, while keeping the crucial task of collecting that data in the hands of taxpayer-funded agencies”. The UK prime minister said that it was his intention by April to complete negotiations on the free online provision of Ordnance Survey maps down to a scale of 1:10,000. The online maps would be free to all including commercial organizations who in the past have had to acquire expensive and restrictive licenses. This measure would bring the UK in line with many other national governments around the world including the US, Canada, South Africa, Japan, and Brazil as well as increasingly state and provincial governments such as California, and cities such as Vancouver.
I blogged earlier about a study by a team at Cambridge University and commissioned by the Treasury that found that making all OS data free would cost the government £12m and bring a net gain of £156m. Australia and New Zealand have commissioned studies of the contribution of spatial data to the national economy that have concluded that with appropriate government policies the contribution to the GDP, estimated to be on the order of 1%, could be doubled.
Thanks to Mapperz for pointing me to the Guardian article.
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