It kind of works like that.
Just to put it slightly differently, we would pay people to go and collect the data, to bring it back to us. That intellectual property lies with government once it's done. It's collected by contractors on our behalf. I would say that there's....
Here's the thing about open data as a philosophy. There's a basic principle there that you create more wealth by sharing the data than you would by selling it. So you create more market efficiencies by sharing data openly without asking people to pay for it, the assumption being that you've paid your taxes so you've paid for the data.