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

Tue Jan 4 20:07:56 UTC 2011

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 7:18 PM, Tim McNamara <paperless at timmcnamara.co.nz>wrote:

> 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
>
> Well, not really. Stefan is nervous about making addresses public without
knowing that the people he makes them available to abide by those same
restrictions, fearing he may be liable, thus adding restrictions that are
messy and difficult to state clear.

However, my overriding point was that it's not clear which laws apply in any
given territory, and it would be useful for the community if there was a
resource bringing these together in one place.

Chris

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