Jusletter IT

The concept of open data has arrived in the legal domain, meaning that certain data should be freely available to the general public without restrictions. The legal framework for open data is becoming clearer, but there are still uncertainties, in particular with respect to copyright law and privacy aspects of personal data contained in open data (even if one data set as such is anonymous, linked open data may often make it possible to identify a person due to the uniqueness of the profile of such person). There are numerous publications, certainly also due to the revision of the Public Sector Information (PSI) directive in June 2013, which will i.a. bring a genuine right to reuse certain content and lower the upper ceiling for charges to the marginal costs of such content.¹

Open data is subject to law, but law as such is also subject to open data principles. Legal texts are basic information of all democratic states. As such legal information must be accessible to all members of society to the widest possible extent, to aid inclusiveness and to enable participation in public decision-making. In recognition of this, the EU and its member states work to make laws, court decisions, etc., publicly available online. Much has been achieved on a national level already. However, the sheer mass of legal norms, instruments and interpretations in courts decisions, commentaries and other sources, makes it increasingly difficult for citizens, civil society, businesses and all involved in legal practices to locate the relevant law. One challenge for the future is to link local and European legal information and have in place structures to enrich it through aggregation and mass customization. The technological possibilities to achieve this are there.

While it is largely acknowledged that open data is fostering transparency and that there are few reasons to not make information of the public sector available to citizens, the economic value is still unclear. There are several studies and estimations from global consulting companies on the economic impact, but the methods and results differ a lot.² It is claimed that open government should be about accountability and social justice, not just the digital economy.³ But still, the one does not exclude the other. There are established players who will benefit from open data (like publishers), new start-up businesses trying to add value and to exploit such value commercially, and non-profit organizations aiming at making knowledge available to our society for free. We might also see «mixtures» between these approaches, e.g. where businesses try not only to make money, but also to help society as a whole – a phenomenon that is referred to as «social entrepreneurship».

Sometimes it is doubted (especially amongst legal experts) that established companies or start-ups can build sustainable business models on open data at all. One successful example in another market is Zillow, an online home and real estate marketplace in the USA.⁴ Chris Anderson, a well-known author and entrepreneur, is explaining in his book «Free» how «free» can actually work as a business model.⁵ It remains to be seen whether or not such new models will be accepted in the legal market.

There are already a few new legal information services coming up, trying to challenge traditional legal (online) services. The following four projects were selected as examples only, there are many other initiatives. These projects would hardly be feasible without open data or without open source software. They are either funded by public institutions and/or donations or simply projects of a few individuals working together in their sparetime. None of these projects has a commercial background yet. However, under many funding programs it is more and more common to require the development of business models, so that the venture will be sustainable on its own. In Europe this may be one learning of the Europeana⁶ project, a flagship initiative of the EU where open data in the cultural sector has been promoted. Europeana was always depending on public funding, but now that this support expires, the question remains, how the project can be continued.⁷

EUCases is a collaborative Research Project supported by Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) funding which was started recently. The project will develop a pan-European law and case law linking platform, transforming multilingual legal open data into linked open data after semantic and structural analysis. The web based EUCases linking platform will provide services linking EU law and case law with legislative acts and court decisions of six EU member states: Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy and United Kingdom.⁸

Neocodex is a project of Stanford Law School and the Institute of Law and Technology – Autonomous University of Barcelona. In their paper the initiators describe Neocodex and advocate for the «creation of a federated, hybrid database in the cloud, integrating law data from all available public sources in one single open access system – adding, in the process, relevant meta-data to the indexed documents, including the identification of social and semantic entities and the relationships between them, using linked open data techniques and standards such as RDF.»⁹ This project will strongly benefit from the open data movement.

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) is a non-profit organisation founded in 2004 and dedicated to promoting open data and open content in all their forms – including government data, publicly funded research and public domain cultural content. The Open Legislation Working Group of the OKFN has been recently relaunched with the aim to promote open data in the legal domain and to support the creation of innovative legal ICT projects. During the Open Knowledge Conference 2013 in Geneva, a legal hackathon took place, where several new initiatives were started.¹⁰ Everybody is invited to join the mailing list of the OKFN Open Legislation Working Group and to participate in the discussions and projects there.¹¹

The vision of OpenLaws.eu has been initially presented a year ago at IRIS 2013 by the author.¹² At this time the project was a STREP project proposal under the FP 7 framework. In the meantime OpenLaws.eu has been modified and accepted by the Directorate General (DG) Justice of the European Commission under a specific call for proposals in the legal area. The project has been ranked #1 out of more than 90 applications from renowned institutions all over Europe and will start in April 2014 with a runtime of two years.¹³

OpenLaws.eu aims to initiate a platform and develop a vision for Big Open Legal Data (BOLD): an open framework for legislation, case law, and legal literature from across Europe. This contributes to better access to legal information and ultimately to better governance. In comparison to the aforementioned projects, OpenLaws will focus more on the community and open innovation aspects, rather than linking legal information fully automatically.

Illustration 1: Open Innovation in the EU¹⁴

The aim is not to replace existing platforms like EUR-Lex, N-Lex, the e-Justice Portal or national member state databases, but to provide additional functionality in the additional «social layer» based on the open interfaces of such systems (APIs), compatibly with the European Interoperability Framework 2.0. Conversely, the results may be used by such other European projects.

In addition to building a prototype platform, the consortium will propose a roadmap to the European Commission (DG Justice) for implementing an open strategy for Big Open Legal Data until 2020.

Illustration 2: OpenLaws.eu in the context of other EU initiatives

There is a significant trend to make information available as open data. Based on this data, we can observe the launch of a few new legal ICT initiatives. Many projects aim at adding value to the existing data, in particular by linking it and by collecting additional metadata. We will observe during the next couple of years whether this trend will continue or if open data is rather a hype. We will also see if new ventures can co-exist between governmental services and commercial offers of established market players.

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Clemens Wass

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