Go right ahead and critique the current arrangements. I did not comment on current arrangements except in so far as I mentioned, in passing that I had no objection to the Met charging TV stations for their data.

I said one thing and one thing only. The Met should be able to charge TV stations for using their material. I didn’t say they should charge everyone. If you read my words as a defence of the status quo, I’m afraid I can’t help that. But they’re quite precise words and they defend only one aspect of the status quo, which is the ability of the Met to charge TV stations for their data.

Without having a fully worked out position on it, my own tentative view would be that everyone should be able to take whatever feeds they wish to take from the Met for free subject to giving the Met the power to require payment (and obviously refuse access if they won’t meet reasonable charges) in the case of large for profit users.

I hope that is clear. Please feel free to persuade me that this is a position that can be improved upon.

http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/radar/

You get a map, and pictures of the rain. You cannot get historical information (and I’m sure that if they detect someone sweeping their site every hour on the hour they would block you, although I haven’t put this to the test). You cannot get access to the raw data sets in any format that might be usable for some sort of value-add calculation (not for free anyhow). The subscription service for the same rain radar is here (note that all the same data sets are available, but everything is blocked from access):

http://www.bom.gov.au/reguser/by_prod/radar/

Regardless of the price of the information, you still don’t have permission to redistribute the data in any form without explicitly asking, getting written approval, and then a bunch of other restrictions also apply. These are sufficient to exclude any GPL effort and most other collaborative efforts.

http://www.bom.gov.au/other/copyright.shtml

So my conclusion is, yes I have paid for it, but no I can’t use it for a whole lot. All I can really do with it is check whether it is raining right now (which I can usually also achieve with the help of an open window or door). OK, to be fair, it is very useful for checking the rain in Perth or Adelaide. It is sad that we have this very powerful tool that locks out 99% of the people who paid for it from either looking at the raw data or doing anything with the data, just because 1% of people make a small additional contribution to the collection costs.

If I offer to sell you a service which itemises and analyses all your contributions to Troppo and comments others have made on your comments, I can sell that to you (if you agree to pay) but you have access to the raw data for nix – just put http://www.clubtroppo.com.au in the url window of your browser.

enable the sale of public data to (usually private) resellers

Generally the word “sale” implies payment. If the taxpayer wants access to the BOM data, they need to pay once with their taxes and once again to buy the actual data.

For example, a GPS navigation engine licensed under GPL (or any other collaborative license scheme) could not use any of the taxpayer funded GIS data, it would require a separate effort to collect all that GIS data again (and people are doing it). There’s also been a few amateur weather networks turning up who are willing to share data.

And access restrictions can make sense if they enable the sale of public data to (usually private) resellers because that can help defray the costs of collection. So the Met should be able to charge TV stations for the data that drives their fancy weather presentations.

So if the TV stations cover (for example) one fifth of the cost of the BOM, then they should have exclusive access to what was mostly paid for out of taxpayers pockets? Why does that leave me feeling a bit ripped off…