ABSTRACT
It is now generally accepted by academics, government and the business community that information has become one of our most important resources for the generation of wealth and power. The battle over control of information systems and the content carried by them is in full fray yet the grab for intellectual property rights has been largely ignored by the press and, as a result, seemingly has gone unnoticed by the general public. While the.press focuses on new offerings on the Internet, the latest computer products, and issues such as cyberporn, corporations around the world have been lobbying their governments for expansion and extension of intellectual property laws. As noted by a US law professor in a recent editorial in the New York Times, ‘Governments are complying, granting monopolies over information and information products that make the monopolies of the 19th-century robber barons look like penny-ante operations’ (Boyle, 1996). Particularly bothersome in the spatial data context is the ‘sell out’ by government agencies to corporate ‘partners’ of intellectual property rights in core data sets upon which value added products and services might otherwise be built by a wide diversity of private sector innovators and distributed through a diversity of channels.
