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

Tue Jan 4 11:30:22 UTC 2011

I don't think that would be a problem in Israel, as corporation here do not
have a right to privacy, and the anti-spam law only covers the actual
sending out of spamץ

Roy Peled
Movement for Freedom of Information in Israel

2011/1/3 Chris Taggart <countculture at gmail.com>

> 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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> http://opencorporates.com
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