Yes, you're right. But it's still a step in the right direction and hopefully others will follow suit. And I am really optimistic, looking at the uber-cool initiatives of the Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/), MIT's OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm), Stanford's OpenClassroom (http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/HomePage.php) and their latest online courses in Machine learning (http://ml-class.org), Artificial Intelligence (http://ai-class.com), and Databases (http://db-class.org).

While I think it's a bit extreme to say they didn't have much choice, it seems to me making data more open is becoming somewhat trendy and this sort of peer pressure may have certainly played a role in the Royal Society's decision. Anyways, the inertia of the status quo shouldn't be underestimated and although things are really not that fair, it will probably take quite a bit of time before we see widespread democratization of data.