COMMUNIA policy paper on proposed amendments to PSI Directive

The Communia International Association’s “mission is to educate about, advocate for, offer expertise and research about the public domain in the digital age within society and with policy-makers.” Communia recently released a new policy paper. “Today the COMMUNIA International Association presents its second policy paper. The paper is a reaction to the European Commission’s proposal to amend the Directive on re-use of public sector information (2003/98/EC). COMMUNIA is supportive of the Commission’s suggested changes to the PSI Directive — most notably the decision to include cultural heritage institutions into the scope of the amended Directive. Access to and re-use of public sector information (PSI) has been one of the issues that has featured prominently in the work of COMMUNIA. The EC proposal to amend the PSI Directive is aligned with one of COMMUNIA’s January 2011 policy recommendations (#13)... The policy paper draws attention to two issues where the proposal to amend the Directive should be improved. The first one concerns the conditions for re-use of public sector information that falls within the scope of the Directive and the second one deals with public domain content that is held by libraries, museums and archives...From the perspective of COMMUNIA the way the amended Directive addresses licensing of public sector content remains underdeveloped and as such has the potential to create diverging and potentially incompatible implementations among the Member states... COMMUNIA supports the decision to include cultural heritage institutions under the purview of the PSI Directive, as such a move will improve citizens’ access to our shared knowledge and culture... While the amended Directive makes it clear that documents held by cultural heritage institutions in which there are no third party intellectual property rights shall be re-usable for  commercial or noncommercial purposes, it does not address the largest category of works held by cultural heritage institutions — those that are not covered by intellectual property rights because they are in the public domain...”