In late April the Supreme Court heard arguments on if Aereo,
a company with thousands of small (tiny actually) digital antennas, could
collect programs broadcasted over the air, package them and distribute the
freely collected information over the internet, for a price. The data is compiled onto cloud storage and
can be consumed for a price on any screen.
Several news articles called this a disruptive business
model (http://freakonomics.com/2014/04/28/whats-at-stake-in-the-aereo-case-maybe-the-future-of-the-cloud/).
The issue at hand was could Aereo take the freely broadcasted signals and sell
them through cloud services. The problem
being that ABC and other broadcasters sell those same signals to cable and dish
networks for a fairly significant amount.
In my opinion there are many elements of this case that are
similar to parcel data, of course. Many
states and counties and cities produce parcel data for their internal use and
then “broadcast” or provide the data freely.
As we have seen time and time again, commercial vendors assemble that
free data, repackage it, and sell it.
Most recently for example, a firm sent out a notice that
users could purchase high-resolution aerial photography for southeastern Ohio
(www.emap-int.com). This is the part of
Ohio with the Utica Oil Shale fracking activities. But this very same product is freely
available through the State of Ohio OGROP program http://ogrip.oit.ohio.gov/ProjectsInitiatives/OSIPDataDownloads.aspx.
So why is capturing freely broadcast programming and
reselling it disruptive and taking freely available GIS data and reselling it not
disruptive? Maybe neither are
disruptive, maybe it’s just the American free market.
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