Re:Australian Geocoded national address data to be made open...
by desdiv on Monday December 07, 2015 @03:18AM
(#10688394)
For anyone else wondering why isn't National Five-Digit ZIP Code and Post Office Directory in public domain like every other work of the US government:
>Works by certain independent agencies, corporations and federal subsidiaries may not be considered "government works" and may, therefore, be copyrightable. For instance, material produced by the United States Postal Service are typically subject to normal copyright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...
The barrier is that the official source of zip code data, National Five-Digit ZIP Code and Post Office Directory, is copyrighted[0], and there is work in extracting the data from it.
The nice thing is that US copyright law limits the protection for "facts" [1]. The selection and arrangement of facts can be copyrighted, but not the underlying facts themselves. So it's perfectly legal in the US to take the zip code data and distribute it, just not in the original form from the National Five-Digit ZIP Code and Post Office Directory.
As for other countries than the US, it would depend on their local laws.
[0] - http://pe.usps.com/Archive/HTML/DMMArchive0810/G013.htm
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...