Re: [open-regulatory-compliance] Non-CRA: Open Data in the Digital Omnib

[Federico Leva <federico.leva@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Felix for raising this!

Felix Reda via open-regulatory-compliance kirjoitti 28.11.2025 klo 8.14:
> The objective of allowing public sector bodies to always be able to charge very large enterprises for public sector data conflicts with this open licensing approach. If the same data was provided free of charge under an open license to the general public, but be subject to a fee for very large enterprises, even if there were no costs incurred by the public sector body associated with making the data available, nothing would stop the very large enterprise from simply copying the open data from a third-party source, which would be able to reproduce the data legally. So in order to be able to charge very large enterprises for the data itself (not costs for the provision of the data, such as bandwidth, anonymisation etc.), the Commission has to abandon the encouragement of standard open licenses and explicitly allow for non-open license conditions, 

Alternatively, they could let member states come up with non-copyright 
restrictions (other than the sui generic database rights), such as fees 
or levies of various kinds. Italy is famously imaginative in that field. 
That would obviously not be a good outcome (at least not for the single 
market).

> [...] (4) Public sector bodies may establish special conditions for the re-use of data and documents by very large enterprises. Such conditions shall be proportionate and should be based on objective criteria. They shall be established taking into consideration the economic power, or the ability of the entity to acquire data, including in particular a designation as a gatekeeper under Regulation (EU) 2022/1925. [...]

This is "very funny" (read: not), because it doesn't say that the 
conditions for very large enterprises should be more onerous than for 
everyone else. Historically the problem has been that public sector 
bodies are very eager to give away data for free to oligopolists like 
Google (say, public transport live feeds for Google Maps) while keeping 
it closed for everyone else. So the revision open data directive was 
meant to level the playing field by making sure that if Google has 
access to some data then everyone else should as well. To reduce 
administrative costs, open data is the most effective way to achieve 
fair treatment.

If we go back to the old ways, it will be even easier for very large 
enterprises to just get preferential treatment, and there will be 
nothing to stop them as the competitors won't have legal recourse any more.

Best,
	Federico