Cost Recovery

Its been widely reported that the California Appeals Court has ruled again Santa Clara's GIS data selling practices. I've mentioned the case several times before. More locally, Wisconsin has the WIREdata case, which has also been previously discussed. Just this month the State Cartographer's Office issued an analysis of the case. While the WIREdata case is not as clear-cut as the Santa Clara case, it does seem lean away from cost recovery practices (selling data for more than strict cost of reproduction).

Now may be a good time to shift away from charging people who use and benefit from the data, and start charging people who cause the data to change in the first place.