Licenses, Data and Software

In an information economy, value is ascribed to intangible products that exist in computers simply as “bits” representations of 1 and 0. Bits can be stored, reproduced, and moved at almost no cost, so the normal [Page 255]rules of economics, based on the scarcity of material goods, do not apply. However, information is costly to create, capture, process, and maintain. As a result, a concept of intellectual property is required to protect those who create or own information. The principal mechanism used to protect intellectual property rights is the license. This is a legal agreement that allows a purchaser to use information but, usually, not to resell it or share it, either in its original or in adapted form.

Both data and software are information, so both are equally vulnerable to unauthorized use, which deprives the originator of the financial return on the effort required to create, collect, or maintain its product. Licenses are used most often, but not exclusively, to protect revenue streams, directly or indirectly.

Software licenses have additional purposes that are related only indirectly to immediate revenue. Software includes embedded methods, algorithms, and ideas that are valuable beyond their use in a particular program. For this reason, much software is distributed without the source code that would make such content apparent. Most software licenses include clauses that forbid reverse engineering, a means of reconstructing the source code from an executable program.

To protect software users from the consequences of a software licensor not being in a position to support their product, some licenses include an agreement to place the source code for the software they license in escrow, where a third party holds the code and will divulge it only in preagreed circumstances. The secrecy implied by software licensing has been criticized for undermining the scientific use of software. Curry has argued that it is unethical for scientists to use software whose inner workings are concealed, because they cannot explain, or possibly even replicate, their results.

Geographic data are now often protected by a license that allows use of the data only for the purposes for which the license is granted. Data licensing is, in some respects, more complicated than software licensing because of the nature of data as an economic good and the fact that the same data may have very different values according to the use to which they are put. Also, data may be changed to create a derived product, which may not contain any of the original data, but has been created from it.

Data licenses are usually granted by the owner of the copyright in a data set—literally, the legal right to copy a work. However, copyright usually applies to a creative work or the expression of an idea, not to a fact. Ideally, geographic information should comprise a collection of scientifically verifiable facts and, as such, would under the laws of most countries not be protected by copyright, could be copied freely, and would not require licensing. However, the selection of facts that are compiled into a map, and even a database, is seen as a creative process. Any map is a single expression of the underlying scientific truth, which will have been filtered through the rules and subjective decisions of the surveyors and cartographers who produce the final artifact, be it a physical paper map or a computerized artifact in a GIS. Maps are thus usually protected by copyright, and their use is licensed implicitly or explicitly.

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