Great thought passi. All it would take is some organization to be registered.. and then anyone who wants part of the data pays some very small fee and then the money is pooled.. data bought and redistributed to the organization members. Most companies provide per institution licensing.. for instance.. inetats.com historical order data is now $1000 a year.. up from $50 a year and thus I can no longer justify buying this data.. I really like this idea Is anyone interested?
Maybe a niave question, but if someone got the data and transferred it into Excel and posted it here, how would any single provider have a claim that it was their own information?
I wonder if they inject small custom errors (say, change the volume information for a single day by 1) so that they can determine if a data set published comes from their source. The only way to be sure would be to gather data from two indepdent data vendors and compare them - if they were identical then I dont see how either could claim what you published came from them.