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

Tue Jan 4 20:09:24 UTC 2011

As I understand it some countries (like Sweden) have the concept of a
"public register" that contains legally public information on people but has
regulations restricting its reuse.

In the U.S. we do not have that concept except that voter registration files
are restricted by most state governments to "political use."
Candidates/parties use that data to target their voter outreach (meaning
exclude those who do not vote).

With most other data it is available, so for example a pet grooming shop
could go down to city hall and get the names and addresses of recently
licensed pets in order to send them marketing material. The National Rifle
Association can get a list of hunters with permits, etc. to recruit them.

I call this the information slave trade where government compells you to
give certain information for x or y privledge or to exercise a right and
then your information enters the commericial market where you are bought and
sold without your permission or knowledge.

Open data is great, but when that data is on individual people and
privacy/reuse protections aren't established then it can lead to less
democracy and freedom.
On Jan 4, 2011 1:18 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
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