Earlier: Earlier today, we received an email from a Government of India organization (we've been advised not to name them), asking us to remove certain posts that we had published, on the basis of data published online by them. We've been publishing our analysis of publicly available Government data relevant to the Internet and Telecom domains since our inception almost three years ago, and are now pro-actively seeking more data from the Government for our data journalism initiative MediaNama Charts; Our take on this unexpected take-down request: - We do not believe that raw data published online by Government organizations, for citizens to peruse, is or should be under copyright. - Our act of analysis and reportage on the basis of that data is not a case of copyright violation, and any move to prevent us from publishing the data or asking us to remove it impinges on our freedom to report on developments, as a media organization. - We could have acquired the same data by filing Right To Information Act requests, and published the data, so why ask us to remove it? We've responded to the department in question; many thanks to Neena Saikia for her advice. The Case For Open Data There is a larger issue at play here - that of the need for Open Data in India. The US and UK Governments are releasing data sets in formats that are easy to consume, re-purpose and analyse - the UK government has data.gov.uk, while the US…
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