It is true in the current situation, though I would prefer that we ensure free data must be free. In that case buyers of data would be incentivized to pressure providers of free data to improve the data quality.
The data without the noise is what you're paying for. The service of winnowing out what you care about from what you don't care about.
Considering how big of an effort it is, and that the source from which it came is still available, why should the cleaned data be free? If I collect fallen trees from public land, chop it into usable firewood, should my bundles of firewood also be free? Or I collect solar power with my own solar cells, should I have to give you the electricity for free?
I'm thinking of processed GIS data. If you have ever tried using the various formats that are supplied by government sites, you know what a huge pain it is.
I'm happy to pay a reasonable price for an interpreted and bowdlerized version.
1. This specific example is BS but plausible - I just wanted something more specific than the vagaries around things like FOIAs or shareholder reports which both have specific facts that can be rendered useless unless you have the context.
2. Basically, list of how much procedures cost.
The data is free, but the aggregated formatted data has been worked on and processed, are you saying the resulting aggregated data should also be free? That isn't going to happen, why would anyone do that work for free?
Or are you afraid linkedIn and others will make everything private? That's completely up to linkedIn or individual linkedIn users what they want to make private vs public. Maybe more data would be made private if they don't want it scraped. I don't think that's inherently a good or bad thing.