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US Government Wants To Start Charging For Landsat, the Best Free Satellite Data On Earth (qz.com)
The U.S. government may begin charging users for access to five decades of satellite images of Earth. Quartz reports: Nature reports that the Department of Interior has asked an advisory board to consider the consequences of charging for the data generated by the Landsat program, which is the largest continuously collected set of Earth images taken in space and has been freely available to the public since 2008. Since 1972, Landsat has used eight different satellites to gather images of the Earth, with a ninth currently slated for a December 2020 launch. The data are widely used by government agencies, and since it became free, by an increasing number of academics, private companies and journalists. "As of March 31, 2018, more than 75 million Landsat scenes have been downloaded from the USGS-managed archive!" the agency noted on the 10th anniversary of the program.
Now, the government says the cost of sharing the data has grown as more people access it. Advocates for open data say the public benefit produced through research and business activity far outweigh those costs. A 2013 survey cited by Nature found that the dataset generated $2 billion in economic activity, compared to an $80 million budget for the program.
Now, the government says the cost of sharing the data has grown as more people access it. Advocates for open data say the public benefit produced through research and business activity far outweigh those costs. A 2013 survey cited by Nature found that the dataset generated $2 billion in economic activity, compared to an $80 million budget for the program.
Trump is just looking for more ways to convert more government programs into being profit BUs instead of public services.
We already paid for the hardware and time with our taxes.. If they really need to, they can allow services to mirror the data.
But will they also return the tax money that was used to operate the satellites that took the pictures?
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
because this is work generated by the federal government. so it only takes ONE 'purchase' and then it's 'out there'... it will only encourage those that use the images to use advertisements or subscriptions to 'cover costs' (and then some) even more.. generating more money and more profits for them, not you. don't expect to make that 2 billion dollars, bub. it won't happen.
Could they save the data before it gets paywalled?
There have only been seven Landsats. Landsats six died on the pad. Landsat 9 is being prepared for launch.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
"cost of sharing the data has grown as more people access it"
Cost of sharing proportional to user count? Bittorrent is just eliminating this exact problem. If only two users are interested, you can serve them at low cost. If there are a few hundred thousands, they will serve each others.
dump it on p2p like ipfs or something
Is that like the CIA, in a hilarious case of Imarinary Property delusion, demanded leaked documents to be "given back"?
Logic dictates that as one of the last remaining successful government run space programs, it must now be castrated, cannibalized and killed so that we can feed off of its rotting flesh. If all that money can be siphoned off instead of re-invested, just imagine what can be accomplished. More parking lots! More malls! More stadiums!
Politicians really are retarded.
Simply rent the are that will be captured to an ad agency.
They will place ads on the land and that way the service can remain *free on charge.
for non-academic use?
Companies that make money from this service should probably be paying something.
And if enough people get peeved about having to pay, I'm sure some private companies would be happy to launch some private satellites.
There are basically two costs: the cost to acquire the data and the cost to give the data to you and everyone else. Yes, tax dollars were used for the first one. That money is spent and gone, and the data has been acquired.
But hosting the files, maintaining backups, and paying for the bandwidth to deliver the data is an ongoing cost and, as the TFA pointed out, one that grows as more people access the data. How do you deal with that cost? Solutions could include: destroying the data, using even more of your tax dollars, or having the people who cause that ongoing cost to pay for it.
There's nothing nefarious about contemplating the latter option.
They're getting the value and can choose not to use the service. Better than making people pay without consent.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
That's what happens when you are living in times of unlimited greediness. That's why we cannot have nice things.
If people want the data, they'll have to build their own satellites and launch them.
I'm sure you can do that cheaper than tye govt
Itâ(TM)s called TAXES motherfuckers. Now give us the peopleâ(TM)s data.
Why is it America's job to do everything for the world?
It isn't and never was and we don't. That's a nice rhetorical strawman you have there though combined with a nice little dash of jingoism.
It's just expected everything will be free of charge. GPS, military protection, US Navy keeping the sea routes open for wealthy nations like Germany to make a mint on exports,
Ok so let's cut the military spending. We spend WAY too much money on it anyway.
Oh, and GPS isn't provided for free nor is US military protection. There are royalties involved with GPS and if you think US military protection doesn't come with strings attached you are an idiot.
American citizens dying from hyper expensive medical costs while the world benefits from cures we develop, the list goes on.
Oh spare me. The only reason our medical costs are so high is because we have a weapons grade stupid system for financing our medical care. Literally every other advanced country realized a long time ago that the government HAS to be an active player to keep costs reasonable and to ensure that EVERYONE has access to health care. They treat it as a fundamental human right and we do not. Our expensive medical system is our own stupid fault and no one elses.
It's bankrupting us to carry all these free riders along.
No it really is not. Our oversized military budget, unwillingness have a rational healthcare system, unwillingness (by some) to assess enough taxes to pay for it all is what is bankrupting us.
We ALREADY paid for it via our taxes.
There are two up-front ideologies which are operating whenever we see any proposal like this:
1. Government should be operated like a business -- no one should get anything for free -- that's communism.
2. Make this cost money so there's a chance for a private company to come in and take the business.
Then there are the motives which are talked about less in public:
3. Damage anything the government does. The government should not have any power over business, and so destroying its credibility is good policy. If something is successful, break it.
4. The establish companies which make money with this data can easily afford to pay. If this is free, competition can arise at any time. Furthermore, competition which is run not-for-profit disappears. Win-Win for the established business.
On TV reasons #1 (phrased nicely) and reason #2 will be given. But the real reasons are always #4, with (especially these days) a little #3.
Reason #4 is especially important, because after this administration ends, there will be money paid in the form of contracts or direct employment to the drivers of the change by the companies which profit from it.
Let's encourage every country to develop Missile Technology.
What could go wrong?
...but as a US citizen my taxes paid for the agency, the hardware, and is paying for the maintenance. It should be free to me, for sure.*
*well, let's be honest, about 1/3 of it was paid by borrowing because as a country we have a ridiculous obsession with overspending, but that's another conversation.
-Styopa
All of those *costs* are paid for by American taxes.
Sorry Trumpass, we've already paid for it. Fuck you.
I think this is part of the war on science, only dressed into "hunt on freeloaders" to gain more support. The purpose of this is preventing just anybody from having first hand view into the effects of global climate change, so that they would be even more susceptible to propaganda and so that climate scientists would be isolated from the public, because then climatologists couldn't say "Folks, here, see it for yourselves" any more.
What "conservatives" won't tell you is that there are a lot of government programs like this, where the economic and social benefit grossly outpaces the cost. There's some monstrous sinkholes as well, but slash and burn to programs that are cost effective is just idiocy.
He who forgets will be destined to remember. - EV
We pay taxes, which fund this stuff. Therefore, "technically" we've already paid for it. But never let it be said, the government won't figure a way to tax citizens more and more.
Disclaimer: I work for AWS.
You can browse Landsat imagery here: https://landsatonaws.com/
More details on the data is here: https://registry.opendata.aws/landsat-8/
The data are widely used by government agencies
You're killing me smalls! Yes yes, I know the argument of "data is plural therefore are", but you don't say "the land are" or "the bushel of crabs are" despite both referring to a plurality, because they've been containerized at that point, much like "the data" became containerized. Therefore, "is" is correct.
It costs pennies to transmit gigabytes/terabytes of data.
What rising costs?
It is not unusual for the U.S. government to try to maintain cost control on its data that is popular and therefore relatively expensive to provide. Sometimes, it seeks to have private partners take on distributing the data. At some point the Patent Office (an entirely user-fee operated organization, not taxes) worked with private companies to provide copies of patents to interested people in addition to the for-free U.S. Patent Office patent copies service. When the USPTO went online, it had to limit expense by providing a painful portal (download 1 page at a time). For-fee companies that the Patent Office shared data with would provide better electronic service at a price.
Had the Patent Office fully charged each patent applicant for its patent in the past? Yes. But it needs money to keep handing out the patents. It has to come from somewhere. Other pieces of the government face the same problem.
Why shouldn't the researchers bear the cost of accessing the data? To some extent it is the U.S. government moving money from one pocket (research grants) to the other (Landsat image fees). I think the out of pocket costs for the public would be minimal for the benefits obtained, so why not defray some of the costs from the users?
Noo, I'd have pay for my lovely desktop backgrounds! Earth is the prettiest place on earth.
...is that, as mentioned, these data sets are often used in publicly funded research. Which means access will in many cases be paid for from grants from publicly funded bodies like the NSF, EPA, USGS, etc. Which means that your tax dollars will go towards buying something from your own government, repeatedly, in perpetuity.
this is about keeping the data out of people's hands. They'll raise the price to prohibitive levels. The goal is to squash scientific research into climate change so their rich donors don't have to pay to address the problem.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Canada wants its money buddy or its taking all its trees down and suffocating just like you cunts and China...
You keep stating outlandish bullshit as if its facts. We already know youre an Amerikuk, no need to keep shouting it like the ignored middleclass child you are..
youre a horrible person and why were disinvesting from america. enjoy your shithole!
If the government needs more monies it has the power of taxation, moran.
comes up every Republican administration, because after running against deficits they cut taxes and raise defense spending. Trying to use NOAA or NASA's environmental monitoring data as a piggy bank is the budgetary equivalent of rooting through your sofa cushions for rent money.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Right and I for one would like to see some actual ROI thank you very much.
You do understand that some ROI isn't a direct cash transaction, right? Much NASA research and data has resulted in huge value to our economy but isn't a transactional ROI. It ends up being an indirect benefit to the economy through business growth and jobs. Harder to calculate but just as real.
There no reason if the business etc that actually derive economic value from it should not shoulder the burden of supporting it.
As a general principle I tend to agree. There are some exceptions that make sense but in general for profit companies should bear some of the cost and risk.
Fee for service government is actually a GREAT model.
Depends on how it is implemented. Some things absolutely should not be fee for service (police for instance). For others it is quite reasonable.
Same goes for roads - toll roads are great! The people who use them can pay - the shippers that run the vehicles that ware the roads most can pay the most.
Toll roads are fine. Until you have too many of them and then they no longer are fine. Most roads should NOT be toll roads and you can accomplish the same results of having the vehicles that use the road the most pay the most through fuel taxes. (more fuel use correlates strongly with more road use) And you don't have to have the administrative burden and conflict of interests that come with toll roads.
Taxpayer money was used to build those satellites and gather that data. It ALREADY belongs to us.
Taxpayer money also pays for the servers required to host and distribute that data on the internet, too.
We citizens have already paid, but leave it to team trump to think they can charge twice.
I'm cool with them charging foreign entities and companies that don't pay their fair share of taxes, but I'm not cool with having to pay for that data as a private citizen. (Yes, I actually have used data from Landsat before and plan to use it in the future)
Hello,
Just curious, I live in the USA, and I can *never* see a doctor "instantly". In fact, the last time I needed to see a doctor, my primary care doctor told me "soonest is next week" and the urgent care clinic I went to, it took 2 hours for me to see a nurse practitioner, not a doctor, and I had set up an appointment 8 hours earlier.
The above experience has been absolutely typical of all my doctor visits.
So, WHERE, in the USA, can you go anyplace and instantly see a doctor? Yeah, you might get one "instantly" if you walk into an emergency room with an arm dangling by a thread, but otherwise, in my experience, you're going to wait longer than your claims of BC performance.
Best,
--PeterM
I call bs. The price can't go up if more people are using the data, unless the government is mismanagementing the IT. If more people use the data, the cost to collect the data is the same, and the cost per user good down.
Is this all being done to help pay for that tax cut for the rich?
Just submit a freedom of information act request for the records
Oh wait, a Republican is in office...
If it works so well for piracy why can't it work for applications like this?
A 2013 survey cited by Nature found that the dataset generated $2 billion in economic activity.
If you aren't even going to read the summary all the way to the end...