A lot of the most useful information that is generated these days comes courtesy of the government and is funded by taxpayers. This is particularly true about basic research, which is mostly funded by government agencies like the NIH and NSF. But quite often, private sector interests lobby lawmakers to allow them to take that information out of the public domain and make it proprietary and charge people huge amounts of money to gain access to that information, even though we have already paid for that information through our taxes. That was one of the things that infuriated Aaron Swartz and for which the justice department hounded him until his death. [Read more…]