Glyn sez, "The Royal Mail has sent a 'cease and desist' letter to ErnestMarples.com, a website that provides a post code API allowing social projects to perform post code lookups [ed: due to the bonkers British law on database copyrights, the record of which post-code corresponds to which address is privately owned, though it was developed a public expense; the public can only use the database it paid for if it pays again for a license from the Royal Mail]. Amongst the many non-profit services that face closure today is Job Centre Pro Plus, which allows you to find jobs near you. Royal Mail is currently looking to reduce its workforce of 121,000 postal workers.
Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group adds, "It's outrageous that Royal Mail should be sacking workers and at the same time trying to close a service that might help them find work. Post codes were created with public money, so they need to be used for the widest public benefit. Ernest Marples have been showing how this can be done. Their ideas need to be legalised for non-profit use, not shut down. Intellectual property rules need to work for society, and not the other way round. An amicable solution to allow non-commercial use of post code data would be easy to create, via a key given only to non-profit organisations. Clearly, something that allows greater use of post codes is needed right now. Better access to information means more social and democratic benefits.
On Friday the 2nd October we received correspondence from the Royal Mail demanding that we close this site down (see below). One of the directors of Ernest Marples Postcodes Ltd has also been threatened personally.Ernest Marples Postcodes has been threatened by the Royal MailWe are not in a position to mount an effective legal challenge against the Royal Mail's demands and therefore have closed the ErnestMarples.com API effective immediately.
We understand that this will cause harm and considerable inconvenience to the many people who are using or intend to use the API to power socially useful tools, such as HealthWhere, JobcentreProPlus.com and PlanningAlerts.com. For this, we apologise unreservedly.
Royal Mail: closing job search over data dispute while sacking workers (Thanks, Glyn!)
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Of course, now that there's a C&D letter out there, I'm quite confident that no one will be able to find a copy of the database anywhere on the 'Net... No way.
Earlier BB post by Cory, linked to here:
http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Britain%27s_postal-code_database_online_at_Wikileaks:_produced_at_public_expense%2C_not_owned_by_the_public
And you definitely won't find it here:
http://88.80.13.160http://88.80.13.160/wiki/UK_government_database_of_all_1%2C841%2C177_post_codes_together_with_precise_geographic_coordinates_and_other_information%2C_8_Jul_2009
Was Ernest Maples charging for the postcodes or the API?
Either way, boooooo. These guys should be celebrated by the Royal Mail for improving the product for them.
Due to the chaotic privatisation of Royal Mail I never know if their barmy decisions are from bureaucrats or capitalists.
Ernest Maples was providing the API for free.
The fact is, Royal Mail is crapping it. Their business model is becoming ever-less relevant as they try to move away from being a deliveries / logistics provider in a digital age. They're overstaffed, under-efficient and yet a source of huge national scrutiny. They're desperately trying to squeeze the remaining pips from data provision to jockey themselves into a digital future.
Sad that they're also, apparently, becoming a bit of an ogre in the process.
Royal Mail shouldn't be crapping it - if less people need a public service that's normally good. The NHS wouldn't be shitting themselves because people had stopped getting ill. It's only beceause of its privatisation that questions about Royal Mails future are so complicated.
I for one look forward to a time when there's no such thing as a Royal Mail, wastefully shuffling pieces of paper around the country. The vast majority of letters can be replaced with emailed .pdf's.
letters? what is this, 1981? The royal mail is used now mre than ever before, with ebay and amazon etc i am forever using it.
the problem is privatisation and the exceptionally bad management that comes with it.
This is pretty low stuff from the RM. Deeply disappointed. Once again, I'll have to blow the trumpet for www.FreeThePostcode.org, the openstreetmap-powered project to get this PUBLIC information into public hands.
The data isn't private; the database is. Crazy. Double crazy when we paid for it in the first place!
I mean, really, yanking the Job Centre's ability to look up 'jobs near me' in a recession? For shame.
Ernest Maples *should* be able to find *someone* who downloaded the Wikileak UK postal codes torrent from a few weeks back ... set that up on a non-UK server and hey-presto!
INAL so maybe this is trickier than that, however piratebay continues to exist and this use-case (free and for indubitable public benefit) seems infinitely more defensible than potentially improper P2P torrenting of copyrighted materials.
Isn't there a project to develop a user-submitted postal code database that is not controlled by Royal Mail or its' privately-owned partner organizations.
Yes, Sparrow, it's called FreeThePostcode - www.freethepostcode.org :)
Replacement should be working
http://www.iexpand.co.uk/projects/mymarples/
It's weird because there's two aspects to "looking up postcodes". One is the "find stuff near me" aspect, which is covered by the Wikileaks database. The other is "I have an address, what is its postcode", or the inverse, which aren't. I'm not sure whether this website did both these things or just one, but it's possible they might not be able to replace all their services from Wikileaks.
@ Felix Mitchell "These guys should be celebrated by the Royal Mail for improving the product for them." Except that it makes RM look bad - providing a service for free that RM (a publicly funded organisation) charges for. Makes people ask themselves if EM can do it for free why can't RM?
"Due to the chaotic privatisation of Royal Mail I never know if their barmy decisions are from bureaucrats or capitalists." They are the same thing these days - Mandelson is calling the shots and if he's not a capitalist, I don't have a head.
IMO the real scandal here is that once again a publicly funded organisation is being slowly, stealthily privatised (as is the NHS and the Benefits service) and the story is about how a peripheral organisation is being shafted because of it. We are all shafted by the privatisation of public services, because we have all paid for them up til now and will not see a return on this investment. Every single public service/utility that has been privatised in the UK over the last 25 years is a theft from the British taxpayer. And it continues apace.
Interesting place to work.
Lots of different people.
Some have been there for a while.
Management were even more into it.
The propoganda was actually quite good now that I think about it. And in that sense I suppose I only saw it second hand. But they were all On Message. The managers.
There is a sense of standing next to some torrent of stuff that had to be sorted. And labelled and coded and refined and packed.
So I guess I sort of understand the exasperated wheezing of disbelief as their business model is scooped straight out of the pipeline and put to work as a competitor.
Seems to me that UK residents who care about this should refuse to use postcodes, instead putting freethepostcode.org where the post code would be. Having to handle the address lookup manually will slow the mail a bit, but it will also cost the Royal Mail time and money.
@mathew:
Not putting the postcode on an address means that your letters will turn up in three times the time, if at all. Which probably defeats the purpose of sending a letter in the first place.
OTOH 10% of my mail doesn't turn up anyway. YMMV.