By Maja Lubarda, Legal Advisor to the Information Commissioner of
Slovenia
Have you ever needed
information on fastest, cheapest, most convenient form of transportation to get
you from the airport to your hotel? Don’t you just love that app that tells you
which neighborhood is safest or where the richest people live? How about getting
information on which restaurant was fined for inappropriate sanitary measures
(you don’t want to eat there!)? All of this is possible thanks to reuse of
information, produced by public sector bodies (public sector information).
Right now it’s one of the hottest topics in the EU legal and political arena.
It's been over a year
since the European Commission adopted a new
Directive on reuse of public sector information. Member States now have until August 2015 to
implement it and are having great difficulty doing so. The Directive introduces
many major changes in this field and its’ implementation will require substantial
legislative changes in many Member States.
The EU has never adopted
legislation to harmonize access to public sector information (except access
to environmental data), However, reuse has become one of top priorities on EU's
digital agenda. While the original
2003 Directive merely suggested PSI be
available for reuse, the new amending
Directive now finally obliges member states to make PSI available for reuse.
This means that member states must provide for reuse of all content that can be
accessed under national access to documents laws. The main reason for such promotion
of PSI reuse lies in economics. Namely, the EU has been struggling to catch up
with the US economic growth and one way to facilitate economic growth is to
mandate PSI reuse. According to the Vickery
study, the aggregate direct and indirect economic impacts from PSI
applications and use across the whole EU economy is estimated to be of the
order of EUR 140 billion annually, while the aggregate direct and indirect
economic benefits for the EU economy, arising out of easier access, improved infrastructure
and lower barriers could be approximately EUR 200 billion (1.7% of GDP) in
2008. It is no wonder that the EU wishes to exploit this potential for economic
growith. Moreover, while the main reasoning behind introducing the right to
reuse is mostly connected with economic aspects, mandating the right to reuse
also enhances transparency. Harmonizing conditions on the right to reuse also
harmonizes the conditions on the right to access of information.
Among other
relevant changes are limiting the costs that public sector bodies can charge
for reuse, expanding the scope of the Directive to certain cultural
institutions (libraries, museums and archives), requiring member states have
strong enforcement mechanisms and inviting states to provide PSI available in
machine-readable and open formats.
As many other
directives, the new
reuse Directive will most probably be implemented very differently in
individual member states. This is also due to the public sector bodies’
“cultural” differences in member states. A good example is in enforcement
mechanisms. While there is a strong need for strict enforcement rules in
Slovenia, this might not be true for countries such as Norway or the UK. While
in Norway and UK, public sector bodies are happy to provide their information
proactively to be accessed and reused making enforcement of the right to reuse
almost redundant, in Slovenia, the mentality is often quite opposite. Many Slovenian
public sector bodies still consider the information they produce as their own property
and don’t quite grasp the concept of it being made public. Consequently, they
often oppose issuing PSI to the applicant upon request, even when there are no
legal reasons for rejection. It would be difficult to see them going a step
further and allowing the public to reuse the information they have gathered or
produced. It is, therefore, going to be quite a challenge explaining to public
sector bodies that they are now obliged to proactively provide all the PSI they’ve
gained within their public tasks - and not just in any format, but in an open, machine-readable
one! Persuading them to fulfill the
five-star criteria for published data to be considered open data, given the
fact that this is not a prerequisite by law, seems at this point almost
impossible.
Nevertheless, weighing
the possible positive results of opening up the public sector and the efforts
that will be necessary to achieve this goal, problems become challenges that the
EU member states should look forward to facing. One should keep in mind that
indeed, Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will be the new European digital
data empire.
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