European strategy for data

Policy and Research
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The European Commission recently consulted on a European strategy for data. The consultation documents and related URLs are listed below. Public submissions closed end 31 May 2020. This is possibly the first of several rounds of consultation.

Six participants (myself included) from the open energy modeling community made a submission (release 08) under our own names:

As well as providing the specific requests repeated below, the submission reviews issues that energy system modelers face in relation to open data and provides some background on allied developments within our community. More generally, we argue that the information we require should be treated as a common pool resource and not a private information good.

Specific requests

The current legal regime must be both clarified and made more supportive of open data:

  • determination on whether human authorship is a necessary condition for copyright

  • determination on whether the machine processing of a legitimately held copy of a collection of atomic data under copyright constitutes infringement

  • improve legislative support for the dedication of information to the public domain

  • amendments to the 96/9/EC database directive to better reflect the intention of lawmakers regarding thresholds and scope and guidance on what constitutes “substantial investment” and “substantial extraction” and how this information should be transmitted to users

  • open licensing by default for market and system information published under statutory reporting (such information usually intended to mitigate market failure and/or facilitate system security)

  • additionally require the above reporting to be provided in machine‑readable format

  • correct and develop the statutory definition for “reuse” provided in the 2019/1024 open data directive (§2.11) in order to align with legal and common understandings of the term (which is currently and perversely remapped to “use”)

  • either clarify or remove the term “primary owner of the data” from regulation 534/2013 (§2.23) which covers the statutory reporting of electricity market information

  • waive 96/9/EC database protection by default on public sector information

Extend existing statutory requirements to publish privately held data of significant public interest and require such data to be in machine‑readable format.

Designate energy sector information as an 2019/1024 open data directive high‑value dataset category and additionally specify key datasets for that new category.

Central and community data standards have useful and complementary roles to play.

European Commission URLs

Some URLs listed may well be transient.

Documents

European Commission (19 February 2020). Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: a European strategy for data — COM (2020) 66 final. Brussels, Belgium: European Commission.

European Commission (19 February 2020). Factsheet: the European data strategy. Brussels, Belgium: European Commission.

Morrison, Robbie (30 May 2020). Submission on a European strategy for data with an emphasis on energy sector datasets — Release 08. Creative Commons CC‑BY‑4.0 license.

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Those are excellent and relevant contributions, @robbiemorrison!

Were they accepted by the European Commission?

In Brazil we have a similar situation with copyright on databases, and we solved it in the federal government by automatically waiving (or rather, an universal authorization) these rights by the government when releasing data to the public.

I took the opportunity to tackle a long standing problem, which was that different organizations in government would either pick different open licenses for their datasets, or would leave no notice of license at all. By defining an automatic open license for all of the federal government open data, it would no longer require managers of databases to decide about licenses on an individual basis. Any existing database rights stemming from Brazilian copyright law (Law n. 9,610/1998) that could apply to datasets that were open would then be automatically authorized for the public to use.

Article 1st. Decree n. 8,777, from May 11th 2016, is now in force with the following changes:

“Article 4th. Data made available by the federal Executive Branch and the active transparency i> nformation are free for the Public Powers and society to use.

Paragraph 1st. The free use of databases and of information made available, stemming from no. XIII from the caput of article 7th of Law 9,610, from February 19th 1998, and for which the copyright holder is the Union, are authorized in the terms set forth by article 29th of that law.

Paragraph 2nd. The federal Executive Branch is obliged to indicate the holder of copyrights belonging to third parties and the conditions for those authorized when making available databases protected by the rights defined on no. XIII from the caput of article 7th of Law n. 9,610, from 1998.” (NR)

This is part of an article I wrote about the Brazilian federal government open data steering committee.

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Actually I did not even get an acknowledgment of receipt. But I see this as a long exercise. Here is what I blogged recently on the current European directive:

The concept of open data is regrettably not supported in the body of European directive 2019/1024. Referring to recital 16 (page 58), the term “shared” is neither defined nor deployed in the body of the directive, And the term “re‑use” is perversely remapped to “use” under definition §2.11 (page 70). Moreover, the notion of “use” has a longstanding and restrictive tradition under established copyright law and this body of law is likely to be material. These legal defaults therefore require that genuinely open public sector information be explicitly signaled as such through the application of established data‑capable open licenses and preferably the Creative Common CC‑BY‑4.0 license.

Nice to learn of some successes in Brazil. Well done!

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