Isn’t this data already in the Public domain? The planned strike in my opinion will kill Royal Mail, they are committing Industrial Suicide.

It’s in the public domain in the sense that the Times is in the public domain: you can view it fairly easily, but Murdoch will kick your arse in the courts if you photocopy it and try and flog copies outside WH Smiths.

All data controlled by the state and state-owned organisations *should*, by law, be 100% publicly available and redistributable without any fee, with the sole exceptions applying in cases of national security and individual privacy.

But at the moment it isn’t, and in the absence of a law to that effect it’s hard to blame the managers of Royal Mail from defending a major revenue stream (their duty, by law, is to do everything they legally can to benefit Royal Mail, not the wider public good).

…

On the other hand, as with any absurd law, if we can undermine and destroy it through civil disobedience then this would be a Good Thing. So rather than simpering about non-profits, let’s set up a WikiPostcodes hosted in the Seychelles so that *anyone* can access the data our taxes pay for…

(yes, this would hasten the demise of the Royal Mail. FEATURE NOT BUG)

Ummm…. can’t we just build another, open-source, database simply by everyone sending in their own address and postcode and those of any they know (with the explicit instruction not to look them up on Royal Mail).

After all, I know what my postcode is and there’s nothing to stop me telling anyone who asks. That data is not copyright, it can’t be.

It would work the same was the Open Source maps do – the OS map is copyright, but there’s nothing to stop you drawing your own with your knowledge of the road layout.

The planned strike in my opinion will kill Royal Mail, they are committing Industrial Suicide.

And Lloyd’s get another 5Bn quid?

@ Rick (comment 4)

There is an attempt to crowd source postcode data at http://www.freethepostcode.org/.

However, there are over 17 million postcodes – and new ones are added regularly.
Commercial GPS devices can only get accuracy to ~10 metres – I suspect the Royal Mail has greater accuracy.
You also need to sanity check all the data coming in – as well as convince homes, businesses, schools etc. to take part.

It’s a noble effort, but much easier to get the government to open the data.

T

@Terence

That’s interesting, but why does it need to be GPS-led?

Surely the fact that “1-17 Cucumber Avenue, Trumpton has the postcode X34 ABC” isn’t copyright. Is it??

GPS makes it easy to do useful things. It allows you to accurately plot something on a map, calculate the distance between points, etc.
Because, ultimately, “1-17 Cucumber Avenue, Trumpton” needs to be mapped to something. By itself it’s almost as meaningless as X34 ABC.