One of the major challenges in managing satellites into space is the long term commitment: getting it up there is a one time cost, it can be high, for sure, but it can be managed, and is getting cheaper.

The real challenge is having base stations to collect the precious signals you want to receive in the first place. To get continuous input, you need stations all over the planet, something only empire-level states can usually accomplish. Now imagine you have a satellite that is in geosynchronous orbit that needs to be also sent instructions about how to reposition itself, and you have a real challenge on your hands.

The idea is that we can leverage free software, hacker and ham communities to collect data. It is a distributed and decentralised community that is highly skilled and can perform such data collection fairly well, given the proper tools and equipment. It's not yet sending data to satellite, as far as I know, but it's a nice first step.

As for property of data, I guess those are public projects, and therefore it is public data... As an example, all NASA output is public domain, by principle.