The Open Rights Group blog brings up an interesting point about the Royal Mail, which is in the middle of a round of job cuts and facing strikes by postal workers. Royal Mail sits on a database of all UK postcodes, matched to geo data on where they are all located. This is hugely useful data for doing search & localisation for companies looking to start up and provide new services. Using this data isn’t free:
[Companies looking to use post code data] would have to pay around £4000 a year to use post code data legally; which raises Royal Mail around £1.3m a year. It is easy to see that large numbers of small business ideas and not for profit services are being blocked by these license fees – it is in effect a tax on innovation.
My question for Tangible IP readers: Is the bigger benefit to UK plc (the entire British economy) the fees that Royal Mail generates on licensing postcodes or all the tax revenue and job creation that could come from freeing the data?
What do you think?
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