jdunck

Where's Cenk Uygur on this?

Given the success of interoperability formats like GTFS and PFIF, why do you think there aren't more such formats?

What bottlenecks are in distributed response to centralized problems can be addressed through these formats and APIs?

Have you seen any successful ID cross-referencing schemes?

What's the biggest surprise from running Person Finder?

Are you a comedic writer because you're black? Can you imagine being funny without being black?

Somewhat more seriously, thank you, Baratunde, for being a slightly-less-crazy but totally honest voice. I love your work.

Why?

I know you're trying to work within the existing legal framework, but this issue stems from the fact that things are presumed unlicensed unless otherwise stated. Before copyright was presumed to apply, registration and extension had to be intentionally done, such that it was quite clear what was not under copyright, if you cared to look. I think we've fallen into a similar legal hole here, where data is presumed unusable. Defaults matter, and no doubt a large percentage of data that would be useful can not be safely used... at least by orgs that stand to suffer attacks from liability, like Google.

Edit: So, do you think a thing like Creative Commons for regional data could be useful? Suppose for example that the prevailing government for a territory had the power to relicense all GIS data in time of crisis, not unlike imminent domain?