In a case that will have a bearing on the UK ICO decission regarding the current claims by search companies that all information required to produce local searches is environmental and should be free the Dutch Council of State ruled that Amsterdam City cannot charge for the reuse of information.
More about the Court decision:
The Judicial Division of the Dutch Council of State (Raad van State), the highest Administrative Court in the Netherlands, on 29 April 2009 published a ruling on the public sector information re-use case Landmark versus City of Amsterdam.
The Court rejected the appeal lodged by the City for high compensation costs for supplying information costs for supplying environmental information to real estate agents for the benefit of home owners and home buyers through Landmark Nederland’s Milieuscan environmental reports service.
The dispute between Landmark and the City concerns the question whether the City could attach a number of conditions and limitations to the reuse of the data by Landmark. Two conditions must be fulfilled: there must be a database and the government agency must be the producer of that database.
The Court ruled that, while the data form a database because there has been a substantial investment, the City of Amsterdam does not bear the risk of this substantial investment, and is therefore not a producer of the database. Consequently the City is not entitled to attach the excessive (financial) conditions and limitations to the reuse of the data by Landmark.
More about Landmark:
Landmark Nederland is part of Landmark Information Group Ltd which is a Daily Mail and General Trust Group company. Landmark provides over 1 million environmental and of land use reports a year for homebuyers and property professionals in Europe. Landmark operates in Germany via its company based in Dortmund, Inframation AG.
Comment by Ben Oliver — May 12, 2009 @ 4:20 pm
Very Interesting. It would seem that they believe the initial fee for the storing of the information is sufficient to cover the costs of the database that personal search companies can access. Something that has long been claimed by the personal search industry who are concerned about ‘dual costs’ being inferred on the vendor.
It will be interesting to see how this impacts on the actions of councils here and the decision on the court case going through.
Comment by Stuart Richards — May 13, 2009 @ 12:42 pm
This is nice to see! It can only help our cause over here. I don’t see how the ICO can ignore it and rule in favour of the councils.
Comment by Ben Naylor — May 13, 2009 @ 2:15 pm
Fantastic news. This should give the ICO something to think about!
Comment by Jeremy Tyler — May 13, 2009 @ 4:48 pm
It was always my view that environment information is public information, the councils are merely keepers of the information and paid to do this by the residents. Lets hope it has an impact on the various ICO actions PALI has with the government