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One of the biggest things that has always stuck in my throat about the web is the culture of "intellectual property ownership" and "copyright protection". While I do not dispute that these matters are important and that content owners do need to be protected from copyright theft, there has always existed on the web a fair and open spirit of sharing. I'm very against piracy and I don't support any type of illegal file sharing - I always pay for my movies and music - but when content owners are suing the arses off all and sundry to protect content that SHOULD, in my opinion, be part of the spirit of openness and sharing, it really grinds my gears.
The latest one is the Royal Mail, who are now suing various companies for using postcode data without a £4000-a-year licence. According to the Royal Mail, postcode data (yes, that little collection of letters and numbers at the end of YOUR address) is part of the Royal Mail's intellectual property and is copyrighted data. Well, at least where the web is concerned anyway. I think it's still okay to actually write a postcode on an envelope - or at least I hope it is otherwise we're all guilty of postcode piracy! Maybe we should be writing our postcodes as "CT15 6YE (copyright 2008 Royal Mail)".
To be blunt, Royal Mail are suing because of certain access rights to its database. In truth the database merely makes finding postcodes quicker and easier. Anyone can still find a postcode a million other ways. Does it really warrant a £4000 per year licence fee to use this data? Isn't a person's / company's address a personal thing? Are Royal Mail simply using this argument to claw in some cash as they suffer financial ruin?
To suggest that a postcode is an artifact of copyright law seems bizarre in the extreme to me. It's far worse than the PRS claiming that YouTube's delivery of music content is piracy (literally suggesting that the act of listening to music is in itself an act of piracy, which annoyed almost every major artist out there when YouTube pulled the plug on their material) and the many and varied cases where small non-profit websites have been sued for "borrowing" little JPEGs here and there. C'mon, we've all done that!
The empowerment that the web has brought to billions of people is outstanding, but the dark side of this is the present culture of "I own this content and will sue ANYONE who even looks at it". I think that there is a huge difference between piracy and openly sharing things in a benign way. For example, I quite often find interesting videos online which I tell friends about. Am I a pirate? Google mass-produces copies of everyone's images all the time in it's Google Image Search (and have been in trouble for it countless times). Are they pirates? If you go to play.com or Amazon you can freely listen to chunks of MP3 music before you actually buy any of it. Is this piracy? After all, nobody gets paid when they play a free bit of music.
I can sort of see why Royal Mail are annoyed, after all their database is a service they offer for money but come on, a postcode is "intellectual property"? Where will it all end? Will they be trademarking my house next and charging me a royalty fee every time I walk into it?
