In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

It's Slashdot that discussed the bad news about Canada Post Files Copyright Lawsuit Over Crowd-sourced Postal Code Database.

Their summary: "Canada Post has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Geolytica, which operates GeoCoder.ca, a website that provides several geocoding services including free access to a crowd-sourced, compiled database of Canadian postal codes. Canada Post argues that it is the exclusive copyright holder of all Canadian postal codes and claims that GeoCoder appropriated the database and made unauthorized reproductions. GeoCoder compiled the postal code database by using crowdsourcing techniques, without any reliance on Canada Post's database, and argues that there can be no copyright on postal codes and thus no infringement (PDF)."

It's not the first time we discuss postal codes data. In 2006, we mentioned the PAGC open source project that geocodes postal addresses. And since 2005 we heard of the global postal codes product from NACGeo, but to my knowledge, it was never really used by anyone (I am wrong?). In 2009 there was news of the U.K. opening up their postal code database.