In America all government information is freely available. Here you have to pay for some state statistics collected at the taxpayer's expense

It's a curious anomaly, at first sight. In America, the federal government isn't eligible for protection by copyright. All it produces instantly enters the public domain - available for anyone to use as they wish.

Every NASA picture, from that most famous image of the whole earth, to every moment of the moon landings to latest Hubble Space Telescope snapshot, is free for anyone to use or distribute. Every government statistic; every speech in Senate or Congress. In this, if nothing else, it's the land of the free.

What could justify such a strange omission? In Ireland, as in most European countries, the government's right to protect what it produces is as heavily defended as any citizens' protection under copyright law.

Perhaps more so: it'd be a foolish plagiarist indeed who'd take on the State by reprinting and giving away, say, the Ordnance Survey Ireland catalogue.

Licences based on government copyright generate a small, but dependable income for many Government departments. Why, out of all the minorities that slip through so many legal nets, did the behemoth of the US government somehow get cut out of the copy protection loop?

The federal exception to copyright has a long history stretching as far back as the creation of copyright in the US constitution. Historically, the country's Founding Fathers agreed to see copyright, not as a natural right, but as a necessary evil. They saw copyright as a government-bequeathed monopoly, put in place to encourage artists and inventors to publish their work, but limited in time and effect. Since government hardly needed encouragement, public works didn't need a cut of this compromise.

Since then, the argument against federal copyright has become more practical. Simply put, the American belief is that citizens shouldn't have to pay twice. NASA's amazing photography, expensive though it is, has already been paid for by the taxpayer. Charging them again for the privilege of reviewing their holiday snaps sounds to them quite ridiculous.

It seems such an idealistic exemption for such a business-minded nation - and one that is potentially rather damaging to the free market, too: NASA aside, how can a private business compete against a federal department that is determined to give its intellectual property away for free. As it turns out, US businesses seem to do quite well out of the deal. Map data, census records, court records, zip code databases, are all zero cost to US corporations interested in them.

There's a database of the latitude and longitude of every street, compiled by the US Census: any company, domestic or foreign, can use it for any purpose. Such useful tools, available for free, lower prices, and remove the barrier of entry for small companies entering markets that depend on such crucial data.

In an internet age, such freedom with information provides other benefits. True, the US government makes no extra money from reselling its work - as it might by publishing them only in book form and restricting access. But if government data passes into the public domain, the costs of distribution vanish too. Rather than having to pay for every copy made (as publishers must), public domain works can, and are, copied and distributed by anyone.

Many a website author, crippled by millions visiting his or her popular site, has learnt this lesson. Hoard a single privileged MP3, say, on just your official site, and you're obliged to deal with the bandwidth costs of having the only place on the Web with your exclusive. Announce that your music can be freely redistributed and other sites instantly pop up to take the strain (and the costs) away. On the Net, it's known as mirroring, and it's the cheapest way of giving something away for free.

Over on this side of Atlantic, the subtle benefits of handing away state property back to the people who bought it has, for a long while, been lost on governments. As recently as 1999, British MP Robert Key was to be heard railing against the US model of doing away with copyright on maps. "Selling the family silver in pursuit of providing national access to all the information [the government] holds," he called it.

The fact that the family in question were those being charged appeared to have escaped him.

But time moves on, and the benefits of letting others redistribute your content has gradually sunk in. Nowadays, British and Irishgovernment copyright is much more flexible than even a decade ago.

For many government documents, such as parliamentary proceedings and the laws, citizens in both countries can redistribute at will. Other departments - like the British Ordnance Survey - have been made self-supporting, prompting accusations of double-payment.

More and more taxpayer-bought intellectual property is being placed on the Net, with the allowance that it can be copied, used, mirrored and redistributed as much as is needed.

There is, however, one exception to this move both in Ireland and the UK. It seems a strange exception, when you consider how much state-funded intellectual property it produces, and how great a proportion of its budget is spent on distribution costs. And, in particular, when you consider that every person who is meant to receive its goods has already paid for them in advance with a quite considerable personal licence fee. That body is RTÉ in Ireland, and the BBC in the UK.

Is it even possible to consider that the jewels in the crown of public broadcasting really give their prime goods away to the public, to be mirrored and bootlegged on the Net in perpetuity? Well, why not? Each has a mission to spread their works near and far.

By far the largest burden on both organisation's coffers is the cost of distributing their contents. And the work they both broadcast currently is just the tip of the iceberg - much of each of their works lies languishing in the archives, too expensive to be used by them, and therefore, anyone else.

Freeing RTÉ's output would mean more than just allowing the Irish people to own the programming they have already bought. It would give Irish media a greater voice in the wider world, too.

Just as the BBC's World Service spreads the image of Britain across the world, a free set of Irish programming for use by any television company in any part of the English-speaking developing world, would cement Ireland as the generous, equable, international English-speaking country: the impartial voice without the imperialist baggage.

As the BBC's charter approaches renewal, many of the more original thinkers within that sprawling organisation are lobbying for such a change.

As the argument within the BBC grows to free their content, perhaps RTÉ could steal ahead and beat them to it. Perhaps then it won't just be NASA which will be giving away the whole earth.