[open-government] Morality checks on OpenData in France fixed in LOPPSI bill

Fri Dec 17 13:26:01 UTC 2010

Dear everyone,

We're a bit tired having followed (and tweeted) live from the public
most of the debates on the LOPPSI law at french National Assembly, but
quite satisfied for the specific subject of OpenData. On an opposite
note, MP's voted some serious threats to Internet neutrality that
keeps raising very serious concerns since administrative filtering of
websites without any intervention of a judge was adopted :
http://www.laquadrature.net/en/administrative-net-censorship-adopted-in-france-pedophiles-unworried

But regarding OpenData, after our first raises of concerns, multiple
MP's from all political groups proposed amendments in order to either
remove, either rewrite properly, the dangerous article 30ter about
"morality checks" on public data reusers.
In the end, after the international letter was sent out, the official
commission that usually settles the votes also decided at the last
minute to propose an amendment, which was adopted and passed over all
of the others.

This amendment (number 332 :
http://www.nosdeputes.fr/amendement/2827/332 ) rewrites the whole
article 30 ter to define these morality checks specifically on the
only case that was primarily intended : private personnal data of cars
immatriculation. Therefore the bill does not refer anymore at all to
the law of access to information of 1978. We could still argue that
having such personnal data accessible to commercial marketting
purposes is condemnable (and may be removed during the last debates at
the Senate in a couple months) but this does not concern open or
public data at all anymore.

So cheers and thanks again to everyone who participated in this by
signing and talking about the open letter !
Big up to Victoria and Helen from Access Info Europe for their help !

Happy holidays !

Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou for Regards Citoyens
http://www.regardscitoyens.org

PS : For french viewers or readers, we've put the video of the debates
online at the following address : http://vimeo.com/17896937
The report of the debates can also be read here :
http://www.nosdeputes.fr/seance/4510#table_12796