The U.S. International Trade Commission maintains the harmonized tariff schedule—an enormous list of what import tariffs exist on which goods. (These tariffs are established by Congress, basically as a form of protectionism.) This list is made up of incredibly precise categories, such as "Wood sawn or chipped lengthwise, sliced or peeled, whether or not planed, sanded or end-jointed, of a thickness exceeding 6 mm," which is, in turn, broken down into smaller categories (evergreen or deciduous), and nests five levels deeper beneath that.
This data and these categorizations are crucially important for anybody importing goods into the U.S. It's possible to get this as a huge binder, "in PDF or WordPerfect 8 format," or as machine-readable data. However, the machine-readable data is advertised as being on "Tape": "it comes in EBCDIC or ASCII." And it costs "$500 per tape" (which one hopes isn't literally on tape).
Oh, wait. It is. From their Word-formatted order form:
_____ASCII CD with fixed length, each line is delimited with a Carriage Return Line Feed (CRFL)
_____CARTRIDGE EBCDIC IBM 3490 FORMAT
_____CARTRIDGE ASCII IBM 3490 FORMAT
_____Other medium may be available. Email [email protected] for further information.
The one glimmer of hope comes from this private company, which allows people to search the database one item at a time. They sell access to the entire list for $200, as an Excel file, which presumably means that they're just buying the $500 file on CD-ROM and letting people download it for $200.
The commercial value of this data is enormous, well beyond selling copies for $200 a pop.