Originally posted by Torsten Rohlfing:
This is a very good point,
and the answer is that we MUST demand data to be made available
under the licenses created by the Science Commons:

http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/72

• Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL) — “Public Domain for data/databases”
• Attribution License (ODC-By) — “Attribution for data/databases”
• Open Database License (ODC-ODbL) — “Attribution Share-Alike for data/databases”

and the code to be available under Open Source licenses:

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index...

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That said, the dirty secret of data is that there is no legal ownership of data,
other that the emotional attachement that researchers feel towards the fruit
of their labor.

Data is not copyrightable: because it is not the outcome of a "creative" act.

A scientist who claims that his data is copyrightable, is telling us that he
manufactured the data, or made it up, and therefore you proably should
stay away from such person and his data.

Data is not patentable: because it is not an invention
Scientific data is factual and therefore is pre-existing in nature.

The only legal restriction to distribution of data is set by the contractual terms
of confidentiality that typically exist between employers and employees.
(These confidentiality laws date back to the Roman Empire and are related
the rules forbiding to use a slave to extract information about his master).

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Once data is distributed, the originator of the data has no right to futher
restrict the use of that data.

Despite that fact, the litigious nature of today's technical environment is
such that the only way to make possible to consume data with peace of
mind is to require data producers to make the data available under the
Open Data Licenses:

           http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/


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The editorial of Science also made the point that to address the case
of data hosting that you mention, the Journal makes arrangements
with the authors to host the data in third party data repositories.