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Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

> He had been ordered to turn over all of their historical arial archives for scanning by Google, and then told the USGS would no longer do arial scanning since Google was doing it. But there was no agreement for Google to turn over their arial scans back to the USGS.

Jeez, that's horrifying. Literally just giving public assets to private corporations.

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Public funded data should be publicly available which includes use by private corporations.

Agreed. You seem to be missing the part where this is no longer publicly available because the USGS no longer has the data.

I believe the original author meant that Google doesn't have to turn over aerial scans that Google commissioned (not the scans they took of the USGS files).

Furthermore, I'd be shocked if Google just kept the original copies that the USGS gave them.

If getting it takes connections or prestige, then yes.

If any entity with a plausible use case could and still can get that data at the cost of the copy, I don't see why not. The whole "copying does not deprive the original owner" meme applies particularly to such public assets.

> If any entity with a plausible use case could and still can get that data at the cost of the copy, I don't see why not.

Can you point me to where I can download this data for the cost of a copy? Didn't think so.

Did you try asking the USGS?

Google presumably also didn't have a website with a download button.

At a fundamental level, my complaint isn't about money or access, it's about ownership.

Yes, money and access are important. Yes, ownership has money and access implications. But ownership in itself is fundamental, and the money and access problems usually don't immediately follow the ownership problems, because if they did, nobody would give up ownership in the first place.

I've said it before and I'll it say again: corporations don't have the right to "innocent until proven guilty". We don't have to wait for corporations to do something wrong to do something about it. A lot of people on Hacker News seem to have this idea that we should wait to regulate until businesses follow incentives to the point of doing great harm, and then once they're when they do great harm, we should just say, "Oh it's not their fault, they were just following incentives."

I don't accept this. It's obvious that taking publicly owned data and making it privately owned will lead to Google placing that data behind a paywall, an ad-wall, or a simple loss of access if Google feels they can't monetize access. Even if Google maintains a relationship with the USGS such that we always have access, there's no reason for the USGS to spend our tax dollars to pay rent to Google as a middleman. We don't have to wait for Google to follow incentives to that point--we can see where this is going and we don't have to pretend we don't.

I assume the USGS still holds the same data, no less accessible than before.

So, if Google has put their copy of the data behind a wall, or deleted it, it's no less accessible than if Google had never been allowed to make that copy.

but... it's not current data. the historical data loses value as it ages. Aerial scans of "one month ago" are now less accessible.

I don't like this but if a corporation is a person, they have the same right to it that the rest of the public has.

If the effort to USGS could be quantified in a cost, I'd expect Google to pay USGS to make the public data available?

It does sound awful. I don't know what the right answer is.

> I don't like this but if a corporation is a person, they have the same right to it that the rest of the public has.

1. A corporation is not a person. Corporations don't have rights, except inasmuch as the people within the corporation have rights.

2. The problem isn't that Google has access to the data, it's that USGS and the rest of the world no longer have access to the data, except on Google's terms.

Wasn't there a seminal surpreme court case that has been used as precident to show that corporations do have rights? Something tax related?

The supreme court also decided in Dred Scott v. Sandford that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves were not included under the constitution and could never be citizens.

The supreme court was wrong on racism, and it's wrong on corporate personhood.

What's right and wrong is a purely human construct and changes over time. The point was that, currently, in the eyes of the law, corporations hold many of the same rights as individuals. This could change, but would require special circumstances not considered previously or a change to the law by congress.

Corporations aren't people. I can't get married to Google. If you can point to specific precedence of corporations being given access to certain data on grounds of their personhood then your argument makes sense but just because corporations are considered like people in the context of speech doesn't mean that applies literally everywhere else.

Corporations aren’t people, but from a legal perspective, they have some rights in common with persons, which is why you often hear statements saying they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

The law is wrong.

I never said otherwise.

Okay, but it's pretty tiresome to hear the supreme court opinion of corporate personhood brought up constantly as if it has any validity whatsoever.

I can sympathize with that. Unfortunately, the opinion of the supreme court is a force to be reckoned with, whether we agree or not.

> I can't get married to Google.

But they can still fuck you over, like when they banned my GMail account for no reason, with no warning nor explanation.

Yea most of the wind about “taxpayer dollars being wasted” is just flatulence but this is a straight up robbery.

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