The nature and ownership of information

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever made an international contact using amateur radio and used that towards tracking an award like for example the DXCC? If you're not familiar, it's an award for amateurs who make contact with at least 100 "distinct geographic and political entities". In 1935 the American Radio Relay League, or ARRL published an article by Clinton B. DeSoto, W1CBD, titled: "How to Count Countries Worked: A New DX Scoring System". In the article he asks: "Are Tasmania and Australia separate countries?" In case you're wondering, Tasmania has, at least in legal terms, been part of Australia since Federation in 1901. Not to be confused with New Zealand, a separate country over 4,000 kilometres to the east of Australia, Tasmania is the island at the south eastern tip of Australia. It was previously called the Colony of Tasmania, between 1856 and 1901 and before that it was called Van Diemen's Land between 1642 and 1856. Before then it was inhabited by the palawa people who lived there for about 42,000 years. They eventually became isolated after being cut off from the mainland by the Bass Strait when about 10,000 years ago sea levels rose due to the ice age coming to an end. In the last remaining local Aboriginal language 'palawa kani' it appears to have been called 'lutruwita' (/lu-tru-wee-ta/), but no living speakers of any of the original Tasmanian languages exist. As audio evidence, we have a few barely audible sounds spoken by Fanny Cochrane Smith on a wax record from 1899 on which she sang traditional songs. I'm mentioning this to illustrate that DeSoto asking the question: "Are Tasmania and Australia separate countries?" is, in my opinion, fundamentally misguided. More so because of an island, well, rock, Boundary Islet, that's split by a border, one half belonging to Victoria, the other half to Tasmania. Specifically, since 1825, the state of Victoria and the state of Tasmania share a land border thanks to a survey error made in 1801. If you're into Islands on the Air, or IOTA, it's part of the Hogan Island Group which for activation purposes is part of the Furneaux Group, which has IOTA designation OC-195. One point to make is that today the DXCC does not mention Tasmania, either as a separate entity, or as a deleted entity. It was removed from the DXCC in 1947. The DXCC list is pretty famous in amateur radio circles. It's not the only such list. I already mentioned the IOTA list which contains a list of islands and island groups and their IOTA designation. There's also a list of 40 groups of callsign prefixes called CQ zones, published in CQ magazine, and a list of IARU regions maintained by the International Amateur Radio Union. There's also an ITU zone list, maintained by the International Telecommunications Union. Each of these lists are essentially grouped collections with an attached label. The list of DXCC entities is copyrighted by the ARRL. If you want to use it for anything other than personal use you need to ask permission. In other words, if you write software that for example tracks amateur radio contacts and you make that software available for others to use, you officially need permission from the ARRL to use it to track a DXCC. If you're an amateur outside of the United States your peak body will need permission from the ARRL to issue any DXCC award. The ITU, the International Telecommunications Union is a United Nations specialised agency, part of our global community, owned by all humans. It peppers its content with copyright notices. The same is true for the International Amateur Radio Union, the IARU, the global representative body of all radio amateurs. It too peppers its content with copyright notices, even going so far as to add requirements that "(a)ny copy or portion must include a copyright notice" and that "(i)t is used for informational, non-commercial purposes only". Let me ask you a question. Can you achieve a DXCC without in