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

Tue Jan 4 19:18:14 UTC 2011

2011/1/4 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'.
>

Actually, I see these as compatible restrictions. Just have those two
restrictions as part of a general "You may use this service as long as you
are not contravening any law" restriction as a term of use of a data
retrieval service. The terms of use of the retrieval service (e.g. the API)
are independent to the licencing terms of the data itself.

Tim
@timClicks
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