Work Package 4: Legal issues: Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs)

RESPONSIBLE: Marco Ricolfi.

WP4, along with WP5 (PRIVACY) and WP6 (CONTROL), forms the core of the project in terms of theoretical legal research.
It includes (at least) three sub-themes:

• Rules on ownership (of the information itself and/or of the products of possible re-uses);
• Other rules currently granting exclusive rights and otherwise restricting access, dissemination and re-use;
• Rules on re-uses.

All three sub-themes have been widely discussed in other legal systems.
Implementation experiences and case studies are available.
The analysis should build on a comparative analysis of problems and solutions deriving from other legal systems.

OBJECTIVES: While there is a growing body of templates which can be followed to enable re-use of copyright and IP-protected works, these are mainly based on the idea that the authorizing person or entity possesses all the rights which are made accessible.
The current state of the art derives from the fact that both free software licenses, such as the General Public License, and its evolution in the copyright field, arose in situations where the authorizing person tends to be self-employed and therefore in possession of all (or most of) the rights required to validly authorize re-use.
Generally, this is not the situation prevailing in connection with entities; in such cases the general rule whereby the acquiring entity obtains IP only for the specific use envisaged at the time of the creation of the work prevails. Moreover, public entities may be subject to other sets of rules specific to their mission, which require balancing between the mandate to dissemination and other, possibly overarching, goals.
It would seem high time that the first generation of open licenses is revisited, to consider the possibility of a second generation of authorizations to re-use which are appropriate in a legislative context where the ownership regime is considered and in which the desired arrangements at the output front drive also the design of the regime under which the public institution acquires the rights in the first place.
The purpose of WP4 is to make sure that input and output regimes dovetail; and to craft the tools required to make sure this happens.

ATTENDED RESULTS: Template (for Local Government, Universities and other Public Institutions) to be used at the input levels within calls, employment contracts and/or public procurement documents. Such draft agreements may have modular nature and offer a variety of more or less broad opportunities for re-use, depending on the constraints deriving from special legislation concerning specific institutions or restrictions deriving from the nature of the data.
PSI output license (e.g. a standard license to be used by public bodies when they release PSI; on the model of Creative Commons Public Licenses – CC PL – such a license may have modular nature and offer a variety of more or less broad opportunities for re-use). Special care should be taken to ensure that abuses of sensitive information (both in terms of personal privacy and/or risks of loosing competitive advantages or level of security if disclosed).
The results of WP4, WP5 and WP6 will concur in defining the optimal policy interventions, including the optimal level of intervention (local, national, European).