On 26/09/2020 13:06, Russ Garrett wrote:
There is no legal obligation for FoI responses to be openly licensed.
The point of FoI is to make information available for inspection, but
not (necessarily) for reuse.
To expand on that.
Larger UK companies tend to be very intellectual property based, so
making information freely available is never going to be a government
objective.
The actual objective will be more towards open government; ensuring that
decisions, and the information behind them are open to scrutiny. A
secondary purpose is probably to try to ensure that the taxpayers have
the results of work paid for from their taxes.
OS are in a funny position, in that they are in the public sector, but
are expected to be self funding. To the extent that they succeed in the
latter, they don't owe a duty to the taxpayer.
Although FoI is often used as a tactic for obtaining information for
republication, as the response points out, that republication isn't
actually authorised by the FoIA; the information is provided for the
personal use of the requestor.
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