Public Sector Information Commons

AutoreDonatella Solda-Kutzmann
CaricaResearcher in Information Law and Economics
Pagine199-217
Public Sector Information Commons
DONAT ELL A SOLDA-KUT ZMA NN
SUMM ARY:1. Introduction – 2. Counterbalancing Interests on PSI – 2.1. PSI Commer-
cial and Democratic Value: From the European Digital Single Market to the European
Public Sphere – 2.2. Access to and Re-use of PSI: Two Linked while Distinct Concepts
– 2.3. Access to and Control of PSI and Copyright Regimes – 2.4. Intellectual Property
Rights on PSI – 3. Public Sector Information Commons – 3.1. Traditional Justif‌ica-
tions of Copyright Applied to PSI – 3.2. The Theory of the Commons Applied to PSI
– 3.3. The Private Ordering Solution: A European Standard Agreement for PSI –
3.4. The Public Ordering Solution: A European Copyright Scheme for PSI – 4. Con-
clusions
1. INT RODU CTION
The goal of the present paper is to assess the congruity of current le-
gal schemes applicable to data and information held by public bodies. In
particular, the democratic and economic foundations of current regimes ap-
plicable to Public Sector Information (PSI) will be examined and compared.
Specif‌ically the legal title claimed by Public Bodies for applying terms and
conditions of use upon the information they detain will be examined. The
foundations of the copyright and sui generis rights which are usually deemed
to apply on Public Sector Information will be evaluated considering other
concurring interests on PSI. This examination will contribute to offer an
assessment on whether current legal schemes are over-balanced in favour of
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), safeguard all interests insisting on such
information and in any case are necessary to fulf‌il the goals for creating and
disseminating PSI in an eff‌icient and sustainable way.
To achieve this, the present paper will investigate the compatibility of
copyright ownership on PSI with the traditional justif‌ications of IPRs and
subsequently explore alternative protection schemes for PSI which are neu-
tral to access to and freedom of information rights.
The Author is Researcher in Information Law and Economics. She has performed her
researches at the Universityof Bar i (Italy),Łazarski, Warsaw (Poland) and is currently based
at Oxford Brookes University (UK).
200 Informatica e diritto /Il quadro giuridico
2. COU NTE RBA LANCI NG INT ERE STS ON PSI
2.1. PSI Commercial and Democratic Value: From the European Digital Single
Market to the European Public Sphere
PSI is considered to be one of the key utilities of the knowledge economy
and various measures to exploit its potential have been adopted at European
and national level1. Because of its peculiar nature, PSI might be considered
as a public asset serving at the same time social and democratic goals as well
as commercial interests.
More recently the Digital Agenda points at unlocking the potential of
public data across Europe towardsthe realisation of the so-called Digital Sin-
gle Market2. The commercial signif‌icance of PSI is twofold: not only are
public bodies by far the largest producers of information in society, but as
PSI is created, managed and distributed to fulf‌il the goals of an organised
society, PSI also enjoys a presumption of reliability, validity, accuracy, au-
thority and timeliness. Hence PSI has been subject to a European action
to enhance its commercial role as an invaluable resource for Research &
Business entities, which are well-placed to capture and realise its value by
developing and deploying novel technologies and services based on PSI.
At the same time, PSI is also valued for its highly relevant democratic
and social potential3: the policies for e-Government, which include among
the rest the digitisation of processes and services of public bodies, are in fact
based on the assumption that transparency mechanisms together with the
1To mention a few of them, Directive 98/2003/EC is a milestone in European legisla-
tion on commercial re-use of PSI; the INSPIRE Directive has set the ground forestablishing
an infrastructure for spatial information in Europe [Directive 2007/2/EC of the European
Parliament and of the Council of 14 March2007 establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial In-
formation in the European Community]; also see the Digital Agenda, Europe’ss trategyfor a
f‌lourishing digital economy by 2020, whichincludes the creation of a fully functioning digital
single market by 2015, A Digital Agenda for Europe, Communication fromthe Commission
to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee
of the Region, available at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:
2010:0245:REV1:EN:HTML.
2See also “Digital Single Market: Action 3, Open up data resources for re-use” available
at http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda/.
3As Recital 16 of the PSI Directive explicitly provides: “Making public all generally
available documents held by the public sector – concerning not only the political process
but also the legal and administrative process – is a fundamental instrument for extending the
right to knowledge, which is a basic principle of democracy”.

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