Today, together with more than 30 civil society organisations from across Europe, we are publishing an open letter (also available as a PDF) to Members of the European Parliament on the Digital Omnibus proposal. We call on lawmakers to protect the use of open standard licences for public sector information and to preserve one of the cornerstones of Europe’s open data framework.
Dear Members of the European Parliament,
The European Parliament has a crucial role to play in the ongoing Digital Omnibus process: protecting the use of open standard licences for public sector information.
While the Digital Omnibus seeks to simplify EU digital legislation, it also introduces a subtle but far-reaching change to Europe’s public sector information framework. The proposal allows public sector bodies to impose actor-specific licence conditions on different categories of users.
This would represent a fundamental departure from the Open Data Directive, a key accomplishment of EU policy that has been refined over the course of over twenty years.
Unfortunately, the draft report by the main committees ITRE and LIBE as well as IMCO’s draft opinion fail to address this highly problematic change, and while JURI’s draft opinion addresses the issue, the proposed solution falls short.
Open standard licences are a cornerstone of open government
The EU itself promotes the use of standard open licences because they maximise legal certainty and interoperability while minimising transaction costs.
A common framework for reusing public sector information delivers significant benefits:
- Better access to reliable information: High-quality public sector information can be freely reused by open knowledge projects such as Wikipedia, Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, as well as countless other public-interest applications that reduce dependence on proprietary platforms.
- Greater government transparency: Openly licensed public sector information strengthens accountability, democratic participation and trust in public institutions.
- Research and innovation: Official statistics, environmental information, and cultural heritage collections are essential inputs for scientific research and European technological innovation. Making these resources legally more difficult to reuse would only widen Europe’s innovation gap.
Differentiated charging for access, not differentiated licensing
The objective of ensuring that very large companies contribute fairly to the provision of public services should be achieved through differentiated charging for access.
Where access to public sector information is controlled through technical means, such as APIs, differentiated pricing is both feasible and appropriate. A number of cultural heritage institutions already manage access to their collections in this way to recover the costs of making data available or infrastructure costs associated with intensive automated access by AI crawlers.
However, imposing differentiated licensing conditions for very large companies has the unintended consequence of hindering re-use by everyone. We urge lawmakers to continue promoting the use of open standard licences. Replacing them with bespoke or actor-specific licences would undermine legal certainty and interoperability. This would increase costs for all users, forcing researchers and start-ups to navigate different legal terms or negotiate individual permissions with often under-resourced public institutions. It would prevent public-interest projects such as Wikipedia, Wikidata and OpenStreetMap from reusing public sector information altogether.
We therefore call on Members of the European Parliament to remove the possibility for actor-specific licence conditions (in Article 32r(4)) and strengthen the requirement to use standard open licences (in Article 32r(3)).
Sincerely,
COMMUNIA – International Association for the Public Domain
ANSOL – Associação Nacional para o Software Livre
ApTI – Asociatia pentru Tehnologie si Internet
CNR Area territoriale di ricerca di Bologna – Biblioteca Dario Nobili
Creative Commons – German Chapter
D3 – Defesa dos Direitos Digitais
Digitale Gesellschaft e.V. (added after the deadline)
EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries)
epicenter.works – for digital rights
GFOSS – Open Technologies Alliance
GLAM-E Lab (added after the deadline)
Musiikkiarkisto – Music Archive Finland
onData APS (added after the deadline)
Open Data and Intellectual Property Institute – ODIPI
Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland