On 6 December 2012 18:49, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari@wikimedia.org> wrote:
My hunch is that public domain would be the easiest to convey, i.e. "government works should be exempt from copyright". It also has the advantage that you can point to U.S. law as an example. Wikimedia Israel pursued the free-license route, but of course someone threw in the non-commercial clause at the last minute, effectively undercutting the entire effort.

The primary governing EU law in this area is Directive 2003/98/EC "on the re-use of public sector information"[*], which (strongly) encourages EU member states to provide government information (implicitly including data) for free/marginal cost for use and re-use, including commercial re-use; there are strong exception classes for public-sector information that is commercially sold. It doesn't go anything like as far as I imagine many of this list would like, but it does provide a common framework so that EU citizens can understand and make direct comparisons of the differences between member states' rules.

When I was still involved in this stuff for the UK Government (albeit tangentially, and not since this time last year) I understand that there was extensive discussion in the Commission and with member states about replacing the PSI Directive with one that was a great deal stronger (it was discussed alongside more widespread copyright reforms, which I suppose is the above material), but I don't know what the status is of that part of their work. Note also the INSPIRE directive (2007/2/EC) makes rather more extensive and specific rules about releasing geo-spatially referenced data held by EU member states' governmental entities, though again, not necessarily for free and open re-use. If people / organisations in the Wikimedia orbit want to apply pressure, that would be the right direction - i.e., via the InfoSoc DG of the EC.

[*] - http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2003:345:0090:0096:EN:PDF (PDF, English version)

--
James D. Forrester
jdforrester@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal capacity)