Opening Public Data in South Africa | Open Knowledge Foundation Blog

It seems somewhat absurd to me that publicly funded institutions in South Africa should be allowed to copyright data produced using public funds. Of course, it is reasonable to expect that physical assets such as buildings, vehicles or machinery should appear on their balance sheets and be reserved for their exclusive use. But knowledge? I’m not so sure. Assuming that the information in question cannot reasonably be considered a state secret, the revelation of which would harm national interests, I would expect that it cannot be owned or its use restricted to taxpayers. Here’s an recent example:  The Municipal Demarcation Board is an independent organisation tasked by government with determining the borders between municipalities in South Africa. They are publicly funded, having received R38.5m ($4.3m) last year from the national treasury. Boundaries are published in the government gazette and are considered to be public knowledge. I am not a lawyer, but intuitively, this data cannot be considered to enjoy protection of copyright laws.  In order to clarify the situation, I contacted them and asked whether, as a citizen of South Africa, I was allowed to download the data from their site and use it for commercial purposes. The response that I received was:  'Unfortunately there is a lot of commitment to our data and it is copyright to us and we cannot allow you to use it commercially at all.'  As an exercise, I surveyed copyrights on the websites of 4 national agencies, including the national statistics agency and the electoral commission, as well as the websites of all 9 provinces and the 8 metropolitan municipalities. In some cases, licensing was unclear or missing. In the remaining cases, copyright was claimed and commercial use excluded, even for derived data products ... As an exercise, I emailed each of these agencies requesting special permission for commercial rights (commercial is important here – in lieu of an actual open data policy, commercial rights give me the broadest possible scope for data use that I can hope for). I am eagerly awaiting their responses. You can follow the action on this spreadsheet as I update their policies as the replies come in ..."