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Open Future has joined more than 30 civil society organizations across Europe in signing an open letter urging Members of the European Parliament to protect open standard licences for public sector information — a cornerstone of Europe’s open data framework — in the Digital Omnibus. Coordinated by the COMMUNIA Association, the letter targets a small but far-reaching change to that framework.
The Digital Omnibus introduces two distinct changes to the provisions governing the reuse of public sector information. The first would let public sector bodies charge very large enterprises differentiated fees for reuse; as we argued when the proposal was published, this is a welcome and proportionate way to address power asymmetries, and it provides a basis for the conditional-access approaches that some cultural heritage institutions are beginning to explore in the face of AI-driven demand. The second related change would let those bodies impose actor-specific licence conditions on different categories of users. This latter change is a significant departure from the open data framework the European Union has refined over more than twenty years.
The letter warns that differentiated licensing would hinder reuse for everyone. Replacing open standard licences with bespoke or actor-specific terms would weaken government transparency, undermine legal certainty and interoperability, increase costs for all users, and prevent public-interest projects such as Wikipedia, Wikidata, and OpenStreetMap from reusing public sector information. The signatories argue that the legitimate aim of ensuring very large companies contribute fairly is better met through differentiated charging — feasible where access is controlled through technical means such as APIs — than through differentiated licensing. On that basis, the letter asks Members of the European Parliament to remove the option for actor-specific licence conditions (Article 32r(4)) and strengthen the requirement to use open standard licences (Article 32r(3)).
