Postcodes are something most people give little consideration to, originally created to aid the sorting of mail and first introduced under Postmaster General Ernest Marples in 1959 the postcode took until 1974 to become universal across the UK. It has since gone on to be used for a wide range of location based purposes.
To licence the database of postcodes to latitude and longitude from The Post Office costs anything from £1000-4000 per year which puts it out of reach of most non-profit and community web services. To address this, Ernest Marples Ltd (named after that 1950s Postmaster General) was formed to provide free conversion from a postcode to latitude and longitude, how this was done is a bit of a mystery as all they would say on the matter was:
Where’s the data coming from?
We’re not saying. But, just to be clear: we don’t hold a copy of the postcode database ourselves, neither in complete form nor as part of a cache.
Their API was used by a number of sites such as PlanningAlerts.com, JobCentreProPlus.com and Healthwhere to provide free information to the public.
The Royal Mail weren’t happy about this and this week Ernest Marples Ltd was effectively shut down by the Royal Mails legal team.
Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, said:
“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.”
It’s hard to disagree with that. If you agree you can sign a petition here that asks the Prime Minister to encourage to Royal Mail to offer a free licence that wil allow non-profit projects to continue to offer location-based services of this nature.
I’ve also been using the Free The Postcode! iPhone app over the last year, I urge everyone to register their post code and latitude and longitude here so that we can at least build a postcode database free of the Royal Mails limitations.
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