[okfn-be] presentation

Fri Dec 16 08:38:37 UTC 2011

The PSI directive and legislation won't help, as for now that still says that allowing re-use is optional. We'll have to wait for a new version of the directive for that to change. 

There is indeed a difference between the rights on the law texts (copyright) and the rights on the database. The texts as such are not protected by copyright, because official acts of the government are exempted from copyright under the Belgian legislation.  As for the database in its entirety, if it is considered original, it will be protected. In addition, if there is a substantial investment made in the database, there will be database rights too. In that case you could use small parts of the database, but nI guess we're talking about most of the database? You could argue that the government has not made an investment and cannot have database rights, because it is paid for by tax money, so there is no financial risk. The argument has been used in the Netherlands (and I guess Pieter can say something about that too...), but so far it has not been tested in Belgium. 

I would say that indeed you'd be quite safe with legislative documents etc., as it is most generally accepted that they should be openly available, so why not just keep doing it and wait until they complain? 

________________________________________
From: okfn-be-bounces at lists.okfn.org [okfn-be-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Patrick Hochstenbach [patrick.hochstenbach at gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 9:12 AM
To: okfn-be at lists.okfn.org
Subject: Re: [okfn-be] presentation

2011/12/16 Bart Van Loon <bart at zeropoint.it>:
> It was Fri Dec 16 at 08:28AM when Patrick Hochstenbach wrote:
>> > Oh, I have a question for this list: what would be the legal
>> > implications of the releasing of structured data from official website
>> > of the Belgian Government (what I'm doing in fact) on the licence of
>> > the resulted data? And also would I/we risk legals stuff?
> [...]
>
>> Strictly: it us up to copyright holder of the database (la chambre?)
>> to define the license on their data and how you can reuse this data
>> and which types of licenses you can use.
>
> It's important to realise that there is a difference between the license
> on the `data' and the license on the `database'.
>
> For example, resto.be holds a lot of public data (addresses of
> restaurants), which in itself is not licensed. But their database as a
> whole is protected by a license, preventing others from copying it as a
> whole.
>
> This is to protect the effort done by the aggregating party.

Now is the question who is the aggregator and who is the aggregated in
this case ;)
With  the  European Court of Justice condemning Belgium in 2007 [1]
for the implementation
of re-use of public sector information you might be in quite a save zone. But
still IMHO it is up lachambre to implement these PSI's.

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/psi/actions_ms/implementation/index_en.htm

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