Comments on: Baroness Ashton listens to Free Our Data case http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/blog/2007/03/baroness-ashton-listens-to-free-our-data-case/ A Guardian Technology campaign for free public access to non-personal data about the UK and its citizens Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:05:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 hourly 1 By: kilian http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/blog/2007/03/baroness-ashton-listens-to-free-our-data-case/comment-page-1/#comment-24803 kilian Fri, 30 Mar 2007 09:46:16 +0000 http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/blog/?p=115#comment-24803 For a start, the data should be provided without licence, not necessarily for free. Anything on a government website (as long as there is no personal information) should be fair game. The government has a history of excluding uses for political reasons, e.g. excluding marketing, because it is not popular (yet legal and necessary). Thereby government has not been very precise with the definitions. E.g. does "marketing use" include list cleaning, where existing direct marketing lists are updated and wrong names removed? Any database, and any added value product will always suffer from different government bodies providing the data under many different terms. Even the standardised "Added Value Licence" from the OPSI is often substituted by harsh "Service Level Agreements" that exclude uses beyond the standard licence. Also, non-crown bodies are not covered by it, although the difference is not always entirely clear. The abolition of licences is the first step towards free data. The government can start thinking about providing the data without financial consideration later. However, I believe many re-users like the fact that a legally enforceable agreement exists between the public sector and the re-user. Otherwise any withdrawal of data would have to be considered under judicial review. This is the position in other European countries, and it is not clear why the UK decided go the route via Crown Copyright to all data. Therefore, politically, the aim of having copyright removed from all data is achievable and needs to be the first step. For a start, the data should be provided without licence, not necessarily for free. Anything on a government website (as long as there is no personal information) should be fair game. The government has a history of excluding uses for political reasons, e.g. excluding marketing, because it is not popular (yet legal and necessary). Thereby government has not been very precise with the definitions. E.g. does “marketing use” include list cleaning, where existing direct marketing lists are updated and wrong names removed?

Any database, and any added value product will always suffer from different government bodies providing the data under many different terms. Even the standardised “Added Value Licence” from the OPSI is often substituted by harsh “Service Level Agreements” that exclude uses beyond the standard licence. Also, non-crown bodies are not covered by it, although the difference is not always entirely clear. The abolition of licences is the first step towards free data. The government can start thinking about providing the data without financial consideration later. However, I believe many re-users like the fact that a legally enforceable agreement exists between the public sector and the re-user. Otherwise any withdrawal of data would have to be considered under judicial review.

This is the position in other European countries, and it is not clear why the UK decided go the route via Crown Copyright to all data. Therefore, politically, the aim of having copyright removed from all data is achievable and needs to be the first step.

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