beachdog's Journal: Consumer and Business Fair Data Access Law ... draft

This is a draft of a legal approach to improving the value of all software. One of the most common practices in the consumer and business software business is to sell software programs with proprietary data storage structures.

          Word processing and video data are commonly wrapped in data structures that are not disclosed by the application publisher. This practice prevents the creator of the data from fully utilizing the data they create. (enumerate more examples).

          The practice deprives the owner of the value of portability, inspection and editing. The practice inhibits commerce, by interfering with the exchange of data and further manipulation of the data.

                Consumer and Business Fair Data Access Law

        It is contrary to the public purpose to permit consumer and business software to operate on consumer and business data without provision for the software to export and import the data in a fully described data structure. It shall be fair use for other consumer or business software to read and write data to the same structure.