99. [...] UEA’s arguments have presented arguments about infringement to intellectual property rights but no convincing evidence has been supplied about the actual affect on the rights holders e.g. impact on the ability to derive value or exploit their intellectual property or other impacts of the loss of control.

100. The Commissioner is in the position of having to carry out a highly speculative exercise as to the potential impact of disclosure. On the basis of the evidence and arguments supplied by UEA he is not satisfied it is more probable than not that disclosure would adversely affect the intellectual property rights of the NMSs and other bodies that supplied information.

101. UEA also argued that disclosure would have adversely affected its own intellectual property rights because it would lose control of the wider dissemination of the withheld informaiton and as a result lose any right of commercial exploitation of the data sets.

102. However, the Commissioner notes that the request was not for a copy of UEA’s current data set but for the datasets that contained temperature data up to November 2008. That particular datasets that were requested were therefor nearly a year old at the time of the request. In addition, the data sets only related to a limited part of the world, covering the latitude zones 30N to 40S, rather being for datasets held by UEA that covered the whole world.

103. The Commissioner also takes note of the fact that UEW has informed him that 85.5% of the information in the withheld data set as already available on the GHCN website. In addition, for the 11.8% of the data in UEA’s database there was comparable but different data on the GHCN website. Only in respect to 2.7% of the data contained in UEA’s data sets was there no comparable data on the GHCN website.

104. Given all of the above, it is not clear to the Commissioner how UEA might have planned to commercially exploit the specific information requested and how disclosures might have impacted on any plans that it might have developed or been in the process of developing. He is consequently not satisfied it is more probable than not that disclosure would adversely affect its intellectual property rights. He has therefore determined that regulation 12(5)(c) is not engaged.

In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story windows.

http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/03/29/the-horse-manure-problem/

The moral? There will always be alarmists seeking headlines, often accompanied by the catch phrase “we need to undertake more research”.