A copyright issue that keeps coming up is Crown Copyright. Many world governments do not hold copyright at all, such as the United States where government created works are automatically in the public domain. Canada not only has crown copyright but often imposes very proprietary license terms on government owned works.
In the case of the postal code to riding database that a customer of mine paid Statistics Canada $2,900.00 for a one-year subscription, the proprietary copyright license was extreme.
While the Government of Canada should not have copyright at all, there are some specific types of works that should at least be released in a liberal copyright license. One example is state-collected geospatial data. There is a electronic petition hosted by the Open Knowledge Foundation Network (OKFN) that states that state-collected geodata should be openly available to citizens. I believe that Canadians need to include this issue in letters that they write politicians so that they recognize that reform (or abolishing) of Crown Copyright needs to be part of the shorter-term copyright issues to be dealt with.
This issue has a personal side to me. The Masters Thesis of a close friend, Charles LaPierre, was a Personal Navigation System for the Visually Impaired. This involved the use of a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, a computer that did voice synthesis, and a software and map that could tell visually impaired people where they were. The existence of Crown Copyright, as well as the excessive costs and conservative licensing of government owned data, made doing this project far less feasible in Canada than in the United States. While there are many different reasons for a brain-drain of entrepreneurial Canadians to the US, it is important for Canadians to realize that Crown Copyright is one of those causes.
