Hacker News Reader

Comment by sachinag | Hacker News Reader

In the UK, postcodes - unlike US ZIP codes, they're not free

Retail product data - books, movies, music, games, electronics, etc: you can kinda do this through affiliate programs, but it's not great

Drug companies - studies can be killed if the data looks bad; we should be able to see every study, completed or not, and all the associated data so we can do comparative analyses

View on HN

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/UK_government_database_of_all_1,84...

This isn't the full postcode database. The full postcode database maps postcodes to actual addresses instead of co-ordinates. You could map these coordinates to addresses but you'd need Ordnance Survey data which you've also got to pay for.

Great... except you can't use the information legally and it will not be kept up-to-date which makes it useless

I can't believe we have to pay for the postcode data in the UK. It should be freely available

Why isn't it legal to use?

Even if I download and read a book illegally, I'm still allowed to post quotes from the book on my blog. I'm still allowed to know the material. Why is this list any different?

An open UPC/EAN database would be great. Currently you are forced to use Amazon but are restricted to their TOS (no mobile apps being a big thing) or the UPCDatabase which is VERY small (but a valiant effort).

The sad thing is that I can see no commercial reason NOT to open the database. People already pay a small fee for obtaining a legitimate EAN/UPC code.

Not open, but an otherwise "free" and official place to get some info regarding a barcode... http://gepir.gs1.org/V31/xx/gtin.aspx?Lang=en-US

RE: Drug companies - I imagine that this would be great data to have for the scientific community. But I am sure this would cause many patent issues for the industry...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com