5.1: Right of Re-Use
Ensure that there is a uniform system of release and licensing applied across all public bodies. Other Information:
Consistent, comprehensible rights to reuse information from public bodies ‘..to protect individual liberty we should have
the freest possible flow of information between government and the people…Public information does not belong to Government,
it belongs to the public on whose behalf government is conducted.’ Gordon Brown, Prime Minister, Liberty Speech 29 October
2007 ‘..Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. ..Executive departments and agencies should
harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.’
President Barack Obama, Presidential Memorandum 21 January 2009 Yochai Benkler put the economic case in favour of this approach
in the Wealth of Networks. It has since been expanded on in Government and the Invisible Hand. MySociety in the UK and the
Sunlight Foundation in the United States of America demonstrate practical applications. The entries to the Show Us a Better
Way competition run by the Taskforce illustrated many new ways of reusing public information to support or enhance public
services. The Taskforce was pleased that our original competition model was duplicated in America by Apps for Democracy, which
generated further good ideas. However, much of the information innovators sought in the UK was held not by central government
but by organisations in the wider public sector - particularly local authorities, police forces, schools, the Post Office
and the National Health Service. This information is not easy to access, impeding innovation, economic activity and democratic
expression. There are two inter-related issues: consistency of licensing and availability of information. Consistency of licensing
- For information held by central government the provisions of Crown Copyright apply. Crown Copyright is often misunderstood,
and we make recommendation on that elsewhere in the report. But Crown Copyright has the advantage of being a consistent framework
for licencing developed by experts after widespread consultation. Public bodies that are not part of central govenrment are
not covered by Crown Copyright by default. Instead there are a wide range of copyright, licensing and re-use rules for published
information. There are significant variations in licensing even within the same part of the public sector. For instance, while
working with the Home Office on crime mapping, the Taskforce found ‘dead end’ copyright notices on some police websites (such
as this in Northants) with no apparent provision for reuse and more permissive statements on others (such as this in the Met).
So a potential reuser of crime information faces over forty different copyright policies. This inhibits innovation, reuse
and debate of vital public information such as crime statistics. Inconsistency in licencing is a particular inhibitor of economic
activity - SMEs seeking to resue the information as part of a business need unambiguous intellectual property clearance -
several complained to the Taskforce. Clear re-use policies can also be important for people seeking to re-use public information
to lobby public bodies for better public services. Individual police forces, hospitals, schools and councils can each set
their own copyright policy on the information they publish. Our experience in talking with data owners is that copyright policy
often arises not from a detailed assessment of the different options but from best efforts by staff who lack access to expert
advice or effective guidance. One typical response from a senior local government officer was: ‘I spoke with the web manager
– she said she put the © symbol on when the website was published some years ago because she though that we had better have
something just in case. She isn’t a copyright expert after all.’ There are contrasting examples of good practice: Essex and
Warwickshire Councils for instance have signing up to the OPSI Information Fair Trader Scheme. We make recommendations elsewhere
about how good practice in local govenrment can be encouraged. Availability of information - Inconsistent licensing and reuse
policies reflects an historically weak policy on information release in the wider public sector. This has been due to the
limited scope of the European Public Sector Information Directive, which does not apply to public sector bodies such as the
police or health authorities. The Advisory Panel on Public Information, in its letter to Michael Wills, the Minister for public
information at the Ministry of Justice, said: ‘The availability of PSI from UK Public Sector Bodies (PSBs) that can be used
for wider purposes is not mandatory in the Directive or the UK Regulations. This ensures that inconvenient requests to use
PSI can simply be parked. We believe that some form of guaranteed right of access and use (subject to limited exceptions,
such as personal information) is essential to encourage the widespread exploitation of PSI. This need not be expensive since
– as we argue in the report – many potential users would take the responsibility for adding value to information provided
in an ‘as is’ state.’ The Directive does not prevent member state governments going beyond its provisions to appply reuse
rules more widely. Indeed the Taskforce understands that now the Commission would encourage governments to do so. The Taskforce
judges that there is a case for the government to do so in the UK. We have also been concerned to find some examples where
information of great potential value for the achievement of public policy objectives is not available for re-use. Departments
are not always operating within the government’s policy framework, which says that core information is made available for
re-use free of charge, including for commercial purposes. This appears to be a particularly significant issue in the transport
sector where services are run by private operators. We found that the National Public Transport Data Repository, described
itself as ‘Crown Copyright’. However, investigations showed this database is not actually public sector data and that the
NPTDR charges significant fees for use. The National Public Transport Access Node (NaPTAN) database, of the bus stops, coach
stations, airports, ferry terminals etc and the related National Public Transport Gazetteer, a topographic database of towns
and settlements, are both Crown databases, but are not freely available for commercial re-use. The Taskforce has found it
hard to reconcile these arrangements with the Government’s overall licensing policy. In order to deliver the Prime Minister’s
vision set out in his Liberty speech, the Taskforce judges that there should be a presumption in favour of information which
has been created by public sector bodies being available for re-use. We would also like to see clear and consistent copyright
and licensing rules applied to make it easy to work with data from multiple sources in the public sector. This would be a
radical extension of easy information reuse, stimulating innovation, economic activity and holding public bodies better to
account for the services they deliver. Recommendations: Government should ensure that there is a uniform system of release
and licensing applied across all public bodies; individual public bodies should not develop or vary the standard terms for
their sector. The system should be a creative commons style approach, using a highly permissive licensing scheme that is transparent,
easy to understand and easy to use, modelled on the ‘Click Use’ licence, subject to the caveats below. The Government should
report on the options for these two recommendations by end 2009 and if required, statutory measures should be brought forward
not later than the 2009/2010 session.
Indicator(s):
|
