SimpleGeo Releases Data for 20 Million Places to the Public Domain

With intellectual property becoming more and more important and powerful, thanks to the work of a few corporations and industries interested in it being so, it's great to see that some companies and developers can still find the value in freeing things up.

SimpleGeo, a company that focuses on location services and data, has announced that it's making all places data it owns available to the public domain, for anyone to do with it what they please.

"Today we’d like to announce that we’re making the data in our Places product public using the Creative Commons Zero, or 'No Copyright.' It is our belief that facts should be free, as in freedom," SimpleGeo cofounder Matt Galligan announced.

SimpleGeo has always had a very open approach to its data, essentially enabling anyone to access and use it as they see fit. The company itself was created on the idea that there needs to be a database of 'places' for developers looking to create a location-based service to use.

Since launch, SimpleGeo has added data on 20 million places, enough for a startup or developer to make something interesting with.

The data is not always the best, since it comes from a variety of sources and is mostly crowd-sourced, but a database of this size can be quite expensive to procure from specialized companies, so it's the best alternative for any startup on a budget.

From now on, any new entry added to SimpleGeo's database will be labeled with a CC0 license, which essentially makes it public domain. The company says that any data it creates and owns is licensed under CC0, however, it may operate with and offer to its customers data from third-parties which may come under different licenses.

"We wanted to see the proliferation of places data that developers could easily use, reuse, or basically do whatever they wanted with, so we took matters into our own hands and began building our own database of places," Galligan explained.

"We view SimpleGeo as a services company, not a data company. We want to build the best services possible for developers, but data is a major underlying portion of that," he added.