Free Our Data: the blog » Blog Archive » FOD interviewed for BBC iPM on making court records available online
"Now, the Free Our Data campaign is, strictly speaking, about non-personal data: we argue that should be made available for free re-use. When you’re talking about court records, that’s rather different: it’s about as personal as you can make it.
But there is a wider principle, which is that it seems to us good if the government is wrapping its collective head around the idea that data can be useful, and that the assumption should be that data are made available, rather than kept secret.
Some lawyers argue in the piece that the court records are riddled with inaccuracies. Obviously, that would have to be ironed out.
But there’s a wider point: newspapers now have online archives, and they don’t delete them. (It’s a principle at The Guardian, for example, that we don’t change what’s on the site without very good reason.) That means that these records are going to be there, even if the government doesn’t make them available."
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