Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing has an interesting slant on who does or does not own the database that was financed by the British public.

“Wikileaks is hosting a copy of the “1,841,177 post codes together with precise geographic coordinates and other information” for the UK.
One odd thing about Britain is that databases produced at public expense — maps of the country, lists of postal codes, transcripts of Parliamentary debate and so on — do not belong to the public. In order to use this data, you have to pay gigantic licensing fees to the government, who accordingly threaten to sue people who use them without permission.”

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/17/britains-postal-code.html

A link to the Wikileaks page is here but it’s unavailable as I write.