[open-government] National legal barriers to open data in Europe

Mon Jan 3 13:31:46 UTC 2011

I've been having an email conversation with Stefan de Konink, who runs
openKvK.nl, a project to provide an API for the Netherlands companies
register, with the intention that we could incorporate the data into
OpenCorporates, and so at one stroke add OpenCorporates URLs and
reconciliation to all the Dutch companies.

Anyway, long story short, a number of issues have arisen which I thought
might be worth raising in a wider arena. The main one is discovering and
understanding which other national laws there are preventing open data in
Europe. In this case, OpenKvk has a licence which Stefan describes thus:
Since there is also an anti-spam law in place in The Netherlands. The
license is 'Thy shall not spam using this database' and 'Thy shall not abuse
the system in such way others cannot use it anymore'.

Obviously this isn't interoperable with the Open Database Licence, or any
other licences, and while Stefan & I are working out ways around it (e.g. we
could exclude the registered addresses of companies), the anti-spam law (
http://www.ivir.nl/wetten/nl/databankenwet.html) could remain a problem, and
I am told there is a similar one in Belgium with potential prison sentences.
It's worth noting (as explained to me by Stefan), that these laws aren't
about spamming itself, but about making datasets available that could be
used by spammers, and requiring you to add extra conditions, thus meaning
you can't use one of the standard open licences.

This has a very real impact, especially for European-wide data,as the
FarmSubsidy.org problems has shown.

In the UK there are several laws that impact on open government data
(including IP, confidentiality, data protection and defamation), and other
countries have similar issues, which undermine the open data movement. What
would be great if -- as a first step -- OKFN could bring together its
European network to get a handle on the situation.

Cheers
Chris

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OpenCorporates :: The Open Database for the Corporate World
http://opencorporates.com
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http://openlylocal.com
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