Dreams of a Europe-wide "free data" zone faded this week as EU institutions prepared to water down a key piece of new legislation. Final amendments to the Inspire directive, which would force governments to make available for free data relevant to environmental protection, will instead allow public bodies to continue to charge for such information.
If agreed, the wording will be a victory for British policy on public-sector information - and for organisations such as Ordnance Survey, whose commercial future was threatened by the plan....
Inspire (infrastructure for spatial information in the EU) was conceived three years ago. The intention is to fill in gaps and remove inconsistencies between Europe's geographic databases....
As a first step toward harmonisation, Inspire will require member states to make geographic databases available online, searchable via a single geoportal. Almost everyone agrees that this is a good idea. Over the past year, however, Inspire has become a battleground between campaigners for public-sector information to be made freely available and governments anxious to protect revenues from the sale of geographical data. The most vociferous advocate of the latter group is the UK, which designates its state mapping agencies, Ordnance Survey and the UK Hydrographic Office, as commercially self-standing trading funds.
EU legislative bodies have mirrored this split, with the European parliament leaning towards free data and the Council of Ministers, representing governments, towards charging....
The council of ministers agreed that free data was unacceptable. The department for environment, food and rural affairs, which led the UK's work on Inspire, threatened to kill the whole directive unless it protected trading funds. In European lawmaking, conflict between the parliament and the council triggers a conciliation process under which a compromise must be agreed by a set deadline. In the case of Inspire, this was midnight on Tuesday. As Technology Guardian went to press, MEPs meeting in Brussels appeared ready to approve a compromise suggested by the European Commission.
This amends several clauses to take into account "the need to protect the financial viability of public authorities, in particular those who have a duty to raise revenue"....Public authorities will be allowed to apply charges for "very large volumes of real-time data" and suspend access to data as an emergency measure....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/24/2006 03:26:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
