Earlier this week dozens of people from the loose open data movement gathered in London to discuss the current government consultations on this policy area. Open Rights Group had organised these workshops to present the policy proposals and our initial views, but also to gather feedback from the community. The main message we took home is that the Public Data Corporation in is current shape is widely perceived as a missed opportunity and huge step backwards, while the Making Open Data Real paper got a much more nuanced response.

You can find the documents for the consultations we covered in the links below:

Making Open Data Real, which looks at the overall policy framework for open government data, but with a focus on opening frontline public services such as health and education.

Public Data Corporation, which is a proposal to bring together “trading funds” that sell public sector information, such as Ordnance Survey and Met Office, in order to streamline business processes and attract private investment.

We will be incorporating the feedback from the workshops in our responses to the consultations, but these are some of the key issues that emerged:

Public Data Corporation:

• Consultation seemed to already provide the answers, participants were displeased at how the options appeared to present false choices and little actual consultation.

• Many participants complained about the lack of economic evidence in general, but in particular for refusing to consider a free open data model.

• The basic data held by OS, Met Office, is absolutely about data infrastructure, and must be free to enable the rest of the Open Data and transparency agenda. Value added data services could carry on being sold as now.
• Private investment in production of raw public sector information is seens as fundamental problem.
• The Freemium option and vague commitments to increase open data introduced in the consultation are seen as fig leafs, and not having any real impact.
• While streamlining data prices and licenses may be an improvement for commercial organisations dealing with trading funds, it has nothing to do with open data.
• It is fundamentally incompatible with the other consultation, the Open Data Principles endorsed by government -- and every other commitment made by Cameron, the coalition, the Cabinet Office, the Communities and Local Government dept, etc.
• Right to Data must also cover the type of data under the PDC. People are very aware of the conflict between the Cabinet Office and BIS, but this is not an excuse.
• The status quo is also unsatisfactory, so we should not let a rejection of the PDC become an excuse for another decade of trading funds and closed data. Reform is necessary, but not this way. People want a true debate on the PDC.

Making Open Data Real

• It has some good elements but it is too complicated and could have kept to simple values and principles already built into policy, such as the Open Data Principles.
• Putting too much emphasis on costs and the economic case could jeopardise the transparency agenda if the benefits fails to materialise. The figures in the paper may be over-optimistic.
• It is good to focus on frontline services because these affect peoples lives directly, but this should not divert from fundamental ministerial transparency.
• It presents a confusing and potentially dangerous mix up of open data, big data and privacy sensitive individual data. This is particularly the case in the economic arguments.
• Private personal data was seen a red line, but the issues were not discussed in detail, although not due to lack of interest. Open data privacy is perceived as a very complex technical issue.
• Concerns about who and how decides what is "data that matters", and how this can change over time.
• A few people were also concerned about the implications of aligning open data so explicitly with the marketisation of public services.
• The implications for existing Freedom of Information were discussed and more clarity and safeguards may be required to avoid loopholes that would reduce effective access by citizens.

Open data policy generally lacks the excitement and sense of urgency of defending Internet users against disconnection, or fighting land grabs on the public domain from copyright term extensions. Nobody tends to argue against transparency and access to data in contemporary politics, so data policy becomes a battle over shades of gray and sooner rather than later.

This time however, there is genuine anger and bewilderment at the u-turn by government on its commitments to open data. There were also critical words towards the Transparency Board in several of the discussion groups as to why it is not speaking out against the PDC. ORG is consulting the community on proposals for how to increase the participation of civil society in the board.

We agreed that Open Rights Group will focus our campaigning efforts on the PDC, while encouraging everyone to respond to both consultations. Watch this space, the deadline for responses is the 27th of October, so there is little time.

We want to thank the Centre for Creative Collaboration and the Open Knowledge Foundation for their help.

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Demos’ panel at Labour's conference today, with the medical information company Dr Foster, the Royal College of Nursing and Andy Slaughter MP, understandably focused on the role of information in the NHS. This turned out to be quite a controversial topic, but highlighted some of the important issues ahead for Open Data advocates.

Firstly, some members of the panel had a tendency to conflate ‘data sharing’ IT projects with ‘open data’. Thus we had a discussion about making health records accessible, and the recently abandoned, multi-billion pound Connecting for Health project. Its failure was outlined by Peter Carter of the Royal College of Nursing.

Yet ‘data sharing’, particularly of personal records, has little to do with open data. Nor has, per se, ‘big data’, that is the huge data businesses like Experian whose services are not dependent of a thriving open data culture. While these businesses may create value, they also have an interest in keeping the data closed, and charging for it. For many types of government data, this would be the wrong result.

Andy Slaughter MP made a strong case for improved transparency and the ease by which government departments can evade their freedom of information duties.

Roger Taylor of Dr Foster made a convincing case for the interaction between data analysis and service improvements.

Some members of the audience made observations about the quality of data collection and the need for analysis. Others gave examples of both incorrect data recording (including one patient – a head teacher - being wrongly described as a paedophile on his non-amendable summary care record) and good clinical results from inspection of data. Another described how he had, in one dataset, had only two patients, due to mis-assigning data. Several people described how difficult analysis can be, when factors such as geography and social class are very heavy influences on factors diet, exercise and smoking.

Thus analysis, and investment in collection and interpretation of data, were identified as very fundamental. Privacy, too, was a clear concern; although the last word on the boundary between acceptable sizes of data sets has not yet been had. Frequently, open data may have no impact on privacy. Sometimes, it may. While the expectation is to err on the side of caution, there is pressure to release particularly health data in ways that may not meet our expectations.

Which? from the audience asked in what ways we could expect the public to make genuine choices in health and education. In health, for instance, the factors patients judge by are often far removed from quality of clinical experience: they are more likely to be impressed by aspects of the personal experience, like the politeness of staff, timeliness of appointments, or even the entertainment provided by tropical fish.

My reply was that we should be concentrating on the transparency aspect, rather than always viewing open data as a market driver. Having said that, I added that transport data is a clear example of a type of data that can drive consumer choice (and that bus and train companies should make sure they view their business as getting people on transport, not selling access to timetables).

There is however a potential question about the possibility of private sector cherry picking on the basis of open data. Thus the public sector should be equipped to analyse and benefit from the data it generates. So far, this question has yet to be fully addressed.

Lastly, I made some observations about the Public Data Corporation. Javier Ruiz is making a thorough analysis of the PDC and the governments’ other open data consultations, much of which my comments here are based on.

An initial concern is how much data really will be released as a result of the PDC, since it should bring together all the bodies that generate revenue from their data, including the Met Office and Ordnance Survey. These bodies hold core, infrastructural datasets, that may be vital to interrogate other datasets (like, for instance, post code data, or core mapping data).

While some of this core data has now been released, the PDC may put pressure to keep more as closed, commercial datasets. There are also issues around the quality of collection of data, and its open-ness, if collection is privatized as many people expect.

All in all, this was a very interesting debate, which showed how far we have to go, especially in order to equip citizens, society and the public sector to really benefit from open data, as well as the barriers to getting it released.

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Today ORG and a number of other groups had a constructive meeting with Ed Vaizey to discuss approaches to copyright and enforcement. The meeting was organized by Dominque Lazinksi of the Tax Payers Alliance after a Twitter storm following ORG and other group’s exclusion from the website blocking meetings.

Given Jeremy Hunt’s recent statements and the ongoing meetings about website blocking, this was a very urgent and important meeting. Ed Vaizey started the meeting by stating that the concerns of mums and dads, important industries and consumers were the most important for him politically.

For ORG, I added that the choices of artists, citizens and civil society were also important in these debates. I went on to outline what we feel is necessary at this point:

1 Evidence

If the new Communications Bill contains new measures aimed at reducing copyright infringement, the government should ask itself:

1.     What evidence does it have about the problems it seeks to address.

2.     What methodologies were used to produce this evidence, and is the public allowed to examine these

3.     Does the government have independent evidence, or is it commissioning it, perhaps through the Intellectual Property Office

At this point, we expect that most of the evidence about websites and copyright infringement is anecdotal, or comes from industry. Whatever it is, the government should share it with the public.

2 Options

Does the government understand the options it has to deal with the problems it believes exist with websites and copyright infringement? Or is it being asked to implement new chosen solutions favoured by industry lobbyists? We note that there are two market-based approaches which are highly important

1.     Market solutions: supply. Markets can improve the supply of products to market, which generally reduces infringement by out-competing the naff, inconvenient, under-capitalised infringing services

2.     Market solutions: enforcement. Private actors have a range of notification, take-down and court processes they can use. Are these being used properly? We note that, despite complaints about foreign enforcement, most of the sites that are complained about are based in EU or US countries where enforcement should not be a problem.

3 Impacts

These fall broadly into two categories:

1.     Impacts on rights and free speech: these are the greatest concern to ORG and our supporters, when legitimate material is removed by error or over-zealous enforcement. With copyright takedowns, this is all too common

2.     Impacts on markets: if copyright enforcement is too strict, it poses risks to innovation. Enforcement comes at the cost of economic duties and burdens, especially for sites with user generated content – that is, all those that are useful.

4 Open debate

A number of organizations made pleas for more open debate, and open proposals.

LINX added that website blocking proposals, whatever their efficacy, should be halted until the current court powers have had time to be understood and develop case law.

Representatives from Open Digital, Coadec, the Featured Artists Coalition, the Pirate Party, Timico made further points concerning the IP balance, the inefficacy of website blocking, the need to encourage new digital companies rather than serve the interests of encumbants, and the perspectives of artists who are partciularly worried about net neutrality and the power of the dominant music businesses.

What about the website blocking proposals?

The meeting was not able to consider the rights holders’ proposals at the meeting, because they are not yet published. Consumer Focus and others have seen them: and they remain very worrying, although possibly so badly thought out that they are unlikely to see the light of day.

Nevertheless, we must see these proposals for what they are: a lobbying tactic to keep the pressure on enforcement and control, rather than market failure.

The task for ORG and others interested in user rights and the potential of the digital world has to be to set out another agenda, that works in societies’ interests, rather than just those of IP owners. We will be working with the organisations who attended today to make this happen.

UPDATE: blogs from Trevor Davies of Timico, and James Firth from Open Digital

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It was very heartening to see the Lib Dems reject the Digital Economy Act as a broken and anti-liberal measure at their Conference yesterday. The main speakers included Julian Huppert, Neil McGovern and Bridget Fox, all making powerful points in favour of a more balanced approach to copyright enforcement.

The next steps in the DEA are problematic, but also may be difficult to stop. The very final hearing for BT and Talk’s challenge, backed by ORG, Consumer Focus and Article 19, is scheduled for 7 October. After that, Parliament still needs to agree to the stage one process, as do the EU. And finally, rights holders have to actually deem it worth the effort: and the costs may well be more than the supposed benefit.

But moving beyond letter writing, which may be costly, ineffective and misleading, towards interfering with families’ Internet connections (“technical measures”) is now much more difficult. Such a policy would surely need the backing of both coalition parties: and the Lib Dems have given a near unanimous vote against such an idea.

The Lib Dems were, of course, very reasonable and indicated their belief in intellectual property rights. But they have taken a principled stance in favour of due process and against unworkable policies and collective punishments. ORG congratulates them and those involved.

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Last year, Nominet wisely started a process involving a range of organizations including ORG to consider how to handle requests from law enforcement agencies for suspension of domain suspected of involvement in criminal activity.

These requests – or perhaps notifications – had been made by law enforcement and acted on by Nominet ad hoc for around a year prior to the issue group meeting. Although only a handful of complaints had been made, suggesting most of the suspensions were reasonable, there are obvious concerns with allowing suspensions to take place without court orders or independent appeals mechanisms.

Over the summer, Nominet published a draft report (PDF) from the Issue Group they created to consider domain suspensions. The draft was produced by their secretariat, from notes made at the meetings, so reflected many of points made at the meetings, but was not an agreed draft that had been circulated to issue group members beforehand.

The draft as it stands is not, in ORG’s view, sufficiently precise and reasoned to be backed by us. While it gives plenty of indications of the approach Nominet might take, we feel the final document needs to be very precise, as well as robust and well-argued in order to convey truly useful advice to Nominet’s Board.

We will therefore work with the issue group to produce a document that is closer to what we feel is needed.

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This morning we heard that term extension in sound recordings has gone through the EU Council. Term extension is a cultural disaster. It means that it will be harder to publish older works, and many will remain out of print. Research showed that around 90% of the cash windfall from copyright levies will fall into the hands of record labels.

Despite the rhetoric, small artists will gain very little from this, while our cultural heritage takes a massive blow by denying us full access to these recordings for another generation.

The government examined the evidence on this question twice - in the Gowers Review and Hargreaves - and both were highly skeptical. Hargreaves - only a matter of months ago - pointed out that copyright policy needs to be based on evidence, and that for copyright term extension, there was no real evidence of benefit. While Hargreaves shied away, probably for political reasons, from recommending changing course back to rejection, the report was very damning.

Around 15,000 EU citizens signing the Sound Copyright petition against term extension. This helped reduce the proposal from 95 to 70 years and delayed its passing, as many small countries realised they were liable to export capital to US-based companies for no real gain.

The campaign against term extension showed that copyright policy can no longer be a deal done in darkened rooms: the public has a strong interest in the cultural impact of excessive copyright and damaging restrictions. ORG would like to thank everyone who helped throughout the campaign: while decisions like this will always smack of lobbynomics and a political failure to understand the public interest, every time we fight, we become stronger, and our arguments become more compelling. Copyright is now a political battleground. Lobby-based proposals like this are becoming harder and harder to sustain.

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We've just received a cheque for £1,000 from the Daily Mail's publishers, after they admitted publishing photos from Alice in Wonderland blog without permission. The photos featured ultra-skinny mannequins. The Daily Mail had asked Alice for permission, but refused her £250 fee (given to a charity of her choice).

“I don't like the Daily Mail, and didn't want to give them commercial use of my pictures for free.” she explains.

But they published anyway. Alice wasn't best pleased at this blatant commercial abuse of her copyright, and demanded they donate a grand to the copyfighters at ORG, alongside MIND. After some excuses, they relented, and today we received their cheque. You can read thefull story on Alice's blog here.

A massive thank you to Alice for her heroics and the very generous donation!

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