Who owns your geo-knowledge?

I read with interest today that the B.C. Government’s deal with Google to turn over its entire geographic database to Google (see also the AnyThing Geo Blog). From the Vancouver Sun -

On Friday, Agriculture and Lands Minister Stan Hagen announced GeoBC, a government organization, will provide 24/7 access to the province’s geographic database in partnership with Google. This information will be available online at geobc.gov.bc.ca and from Google Earth.

This is a great opportunity for the government to disseminate its geo-content through another portal. The deal allows the BC government to follow its mission to best serve the public that originally paid for the geo-content.

However, if you review what is happening in Hollywood with respect to writers and actors demands for a greater share of the digital reviews from marketing their products through non-traditional portals, i.e. the Internet, I believe that there may be storm clouds on the horizons for geo-content producers.

For Google, it is a great way to get content with which to build the LBS business that will eventually sell advertising. Yet in its traditional business, Google pays referral fees to content providers for other types of content, such as blogs, using Adsense. It is unknown whether they are paying anything to the BC government, but the geo-content creators will receive nothing.

One could argue that the geo-content creators have already been paid. But this is the same argument used by the studios in the writers strike. I think that this may be a future issue for our field.