Open public sector information workshop during Free Culture Forum
The Free Culture Forum 2010 kicked off with a European panel on Open Public Sector Information, organised by the LAPSI network. Although attendance was reduced because most participants were arriving that day for the main sessions the following day, it was a good opening for the four days of intense debate that ensued.
Raimondo Iemma presented the perspective from Piemonte, Italy, increasingly relevant as European regions become more vocal thus making administrations more devolved. The Piemonte has been pioneering this field and are hosting the EVPSI project to understand the economics of PSI. The discussion included discussions on several key issues on PSI. The non-discrimination of commercial re-use seems the only workable solution form a practical point of view and provides best overall value to society, but there are still concerns from some sectors about private companies making profits from public data. Another issue was the cost of data, which initially is negligible, as the data has already been produced, but over time maintenance and enhancements will add up, and there is no clear strategy on how to deal with this. Also in need for clearer thinking were issues of privacy, generally acknowledged but without any detailed formulation.
Daniel Dietrich from the Open Knowledge Foundation, ran through some of the challenges facing the Open PSI movement. These included fragmentation of data in sectors and regions, which makes it difficult to discover what is available, so Information Asset Registers and Data Catalogues are important. It is also difficult to make sense of the legal openness with unclear licensing and varying versions fo freedom of information legislation. Generally, Daniel framed PSI within the context of Open Government, which means democratic transparency, participation and also promoting innovation and development.
Marc de Vries gave a very good introduction to the legal framework governing PSI re-use, illustrated by the obstacles faced by his case law exchange project, Caselex. The four main legal pillars of PSI discussed were: Freedom of Information for basic access, IP law – including EU database directive – for copyright, ICT law for technical formats, and Competition Law for fair use – mostly through the PSI re-use regulations directive 2003. In practice, apart from Environmental Data which is regulated at EU level, everything works at national level, so the business case for opening up data has to be done at that level. In the discussion the possibility was raised of governments using open data to transfer responsibilities, relinquish their duty and legitimise the forthcoming austerity measures.
The remaining presentations in the panel related to cultural PSI. Thorsten Siegmann introduced some of the particularities of culture in the context of open data through his contributions towards the Europeana project to create a central catalogue of European cultural heritage. This included the conflict between the educational and commercial imperatives, and the copyright minefield. Raquel Xalabander explained how cultural works were outside PSI regulations, but still some practitioners were trying to abide by the same principles. The main legal distinction in the field is between information – protected by database rights – and the actual content – covered by copyright, which means that is considered “a work”, as in being an original creation. A recurrent problem with cultural works held in the public sector is to identify the author to ask for permission for access and re-use. Collective works and works created under commission are particularly problematic for the clearing of copyrights, but the biggest problem is that of “orphan works”. Here the author is either unknown or untraceable, which under the existing default restrictive position means those works are caught in a Kafkaesque closed loop.
A different aspect of dealing with finding people form the past are the privacy concerns raised by publishing media with private persons, such as old pictures of political demonstrations which could embarrass participants today. The issues here are solvable in principle, although they could be very expensive for large projects. On costs, the preferred position was to charge marginal costs.
The discussion got very heated when it got to licensing. Restrictions on commercial re-use were presented as very limiting in the cultural area, almost tantamount to equating the existing opportunities through copyright exceptions. However, the room temperature was raised when Raquel stated that open licenses and copyleft were not fit for this purpose and that publicly held cultural works should have their own license. She pointed at DRM ban on derivatives as a serious block to commercial re-use, while seeing copyleft as good for the individual end user, but not for the public sector culture providers, as they are left without recourse against future events. She was accused of lumping all open licensing under the non-restricted licenses, such as Creative-Commons-Zero and oversimplifying the case. We didn’t hear in more detail what those special licenses would look like, but my personal observation was that she may be missing the dual aspect of authors and users that digital remix culture brings, and which complicates her analysis of who benefits.
Ending on this note was a good pointer for the main discussions of the Forum, which related to the sustainability of the Free Culture produce by the creativity unleashed through open licensing, Internet collaboration and occasional raids on with the established copyright silos that hold western popular culture of the 20th century.