If the Commission truly wishes to allow public sector bodies to charge VLEs while preserving open licensing for everyone else, the solution is straightforward:
- Maintain CC-0 or CC-BY licensing for all public sector data for natural persons, civil society organizations, open source stewards, and SMEs.
- Create a separate commercial licensing regime for VLEs, where fees scale with the economic capacity of the entity, similar to foundation membership tiers.
- Prohibit VLEs from circumventing this regime by obtaining openly-licensed data through intermediaries.
Daniel,
The problem is that this doesn't work. If the content is CC0 or CC-BY, then anyone can download it and give it away for free to the VLEs. There's no stoping this; it's specifically allowed by the license.
And if it's not CC0 or CC-BY, then… well, it is not CC0 or CC-BY for anyone.
There's no concrete way of preventing usage for a category of actors without moving out of open licenses and moving into new territory. This new ground shouldn't be threaded lightly, imho.
(If you're interested in exploring the data sovereignty space, I've found the Kaitiakitanga License of the Māori super interesting. More background and context here.)
So it's not accidental that the model you use to make your point actually relies on open access to the underlying code base (not on closed licenses) and tiered payment for the related benefits.
Policies for recouping distribution costs (including operational costs) seem like a much more reasonable way to approach the issue without triggering a lot of unwanted side effects, not to mention just increasing taxes on VLEs.
I believe one can be in favor of increased sovereignty and more wealth redistribution, and acknowledge that open licensing isn't the best way to achieve these goals (and comes with unpleasant side-effects that impact everyone).
That said, I don't have an opinion as to whether ORC should tackle these issues or not.
Best,
--tobie
