Legal interoperability: making Open Government Data compatible with businesses and communities

Legal interoperability could be defined as the possibility of legally mixing data coming from different sources (including governmental data, data generated by online communities and data held by private parties). Legal interoperability is similar to technical interoperability, since it is a prerequisite for mixing data and create new knowledge or services. But it also has its own peculiarities, for instance because it could be achieved simply choosing the appropriate licensing scheme, but also because self-help mechanisms which could - at a certain price - guarantee technical interoperability to third parties cannot (lawfully) solve legal interoperability issues. In the mid/long run, legal interoperability could be achieved thorough the evolution of legal frameworks in order to harmonize the landscape of Government Data. In the short term, the shortcomings generated by diversified legal frameworks may be alleviated through the careful choice of copyright licenses. The presentation will focus on the latter aspects, discussing existing public licenses (such as the Creative Commons and Open Data Commons ones), representing a de facto standard in this domain, and the main open data licenses developed by European governments (e.g. the Open Government Licenses in the UK, the French License Ouverte or the Italian Open Data License

SOFTWARE INTEROPERABILITY: Issues at the Intersection between Intellectual Property and Competition Policy

The dissertation project proceeds through three papers, analyzing issues related to software interoperability and respectively pertaining to one of the three following interdependent levels of analysis. The first level addresses the legal status of software interoperability information under current intellectual property law (focusing on copyright law, which is the main legal tool for the protection of these pieces of code), trying to clarify if, how and to what extent theses pieces of code (and the associated pieces of information) are protected erga omnes by the law. The second level complements the first one, analyzing legal and economic issues related to the technical possibility of actually accessing this interoperability information through reverse engineering (and software decompilation in particular). Once a de facto standard gains the favor of the market, reverse engineering is the main self-help tool available to competitors in order to achieve interoperability and compete “inside this standard”. The third step consists in recognizing that – in a limited number of cases, but which are potentially of great economic relevance – market failures could arise, despite any care taken in devising checks and balances in the legal setting concerning both the legal status of interoperability information and the legal rules governing software reverse engineering. When this is the case, some undertakings may stably gain a dominant position in software markets, and possibly abuse it. Hence, at this level of analysis, competition policy intervention is taken into account. The first paper of the present dissertation shows that interoperability specifications are not protected by copyright. In the paper, I argue that existing doubts and uncertainty are typically related to a poor understanding of the technical nature of software interfaces. To remedy such misunderstanding, the paper focuses on the distinction between interface specifications and implementations and stresses the difference between the steps needed to access to the ideas and principle constituting an interfaces specification and the re-implementation of a functionally equivalent interface through new software code. At the normative level, the paper shows that no major modifications to the existing model of legal protection of software (and software interfaces) are needed; however, it suggests that policymakers could reduce the Fear of legal actions, other forms of legal Uncertainty and several residual Doubts (FUD) by explicitly stating that interface specifications are unprotectable and freely appropriable. In the second paper, I offer a critique of legal restraints on software reverse engineering, focusing in particular on Europe, but considering also similar restraints in the US, in particular in the context of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Through an analysis of entry conditions for late comers and of the comparative costs of developing programs in the first place or reverse engineering them, the paper shows that limitations on decompilation imposed by article 6 of the Software Directive were mostly superfluous and basically non-binding at the time of drafting. What is more, the paper shows that nowadays new – and largely unanticipated – developments in software development models (e.g. open source) make these restraints an obstacle to competition against dominant incumbent controlling software platforms. In fact, limitations on the freedom to decompile obstacle major reverse engineering projects performed in a decentralized way, as in the context of an open source community. Hence, since open source projects are the most credible tools to recreate some competitive pressure in a number of crucial software markets, the paper recommends creating a simpler and clear-cut safe harbor for software reverse engineering. The third paper claims that, in software markets, refusal-to-deal (or “information-withholding”) strategies are normally complementary with tying (or “predatory-innovation”) strategies, and that this complementarity is so relevant that dominant platform controllers need to couple both in order to create significant anti- competitive effects. Hence, the paper argues that mandatory unbundling (i.e. mandating a certain degree of modularity in software development) could be an appropriate – and frequently preferable – alternative to mandatory disclosure of interoperability information. However, considering the critiques moved from part of the literature to the Commission’s Decision in the recent European Microsoft antitrust case, an objection to the previous argument could be that – also in the case of mandatory unbundling – one should still determine the minimum price for the unbundled product. The last part of the paper applies some intuitions coming from the literature concerning complementary oligopoly to demonstrate that this objection is not well grounded and that – in software markets – mandatory unbundling (modularity) may be a useful policy even if the only constraint on the price of the unbundled good is the one of non-negativity

Is there such a thing as free government data?

The recently-amended European Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive rests on the assumption that government data is a valuable input for the knowledge economy. As a default principle, the directive sets marginal costs as an upper bound for charging PSI. This article discusses the terms under which the 2013 consultation on the implementation of the PSI Directive addresses the calculation criteria for marginal costs, which are complex to define, especially for internet-based services. What is found is that the allowed answers of the consultation indirectly lead the responder to reason in terms of the average incremental cost of allowing reuse, instead of the marginal cost of reproduction, provision and dissemination. Moreover, marginal-cost pricing (or zero pricing) is expected to lead to economically efficient results, while aiming at recouping the average incremental cost of allowing re-use may lead to excessive fees

Exploiting Linked Open Data and Natural Language Processing for Classification of Political Speech

This paper shows the effectiveness of a DBpedia-based approach for text categorization in the e-government field. Our use case is the analysis of all the speech transcripts of current White House members. This task is performed by means of TellMeFirst, an open-source software that leverages the DBpedia knowledge base and the English Wikipedia linguistic corpus for topic extraction. Analysis results allow to identify the main political trends addressed by the White House, increasing the citizens' awareness to issues discussed by politicians. Unlike methods based on string recognition, TellMeFirst semantically classifies documents through DBpedia URIs, gathering all the words that belong to a similar area of meaning (such as synonyms, hypernyms and hyponyms of a lemma) under the same unambiguous concept

Collaborative Open Data versioning: a pragmatic approach using Linked Data

Most Open Government Data initiatives are centralised and unidirectional (i.e., they release data dumps in CSV or PDF format). Hence for non trivial applications reusers make copies of the government datasets to curate their local data copy. This situation is not optimal as it leads to duplication of efforts and reduces the possibility of sharing improvements. To improve the usefulness of publishing open data, several authors recommeded to use standard formats and data versioning. Here we focus on publishing versioned open linked data (i.e., in RDF format) because they allow one party to annotate data released independently by another party thus reducing the need to duplicate entire datasets. After describing a pipeline to open up legacy-databases data in RDF format, we argue that RDF is suitable to implement a scalable feedback channel, and we investigate what steps are needed to implement a distributed RDFversioning system in production

The CoBiS Linked Open Data Project and Portal

The CoBiS (Coordination Committee of Turin Metropolitan Area Special and Specialized Libraries) is a network formed by 65 libraries. The CoBiS Linked Open Data project is a pilot for Piedmont Region and has the purpose to provide the Committee with an infrastructure for LOD publishing, creating a triplification pipeline designed to be easy to automate and replicate. This will be realized with open source technologies, such as the RML mapping language that uses Linked Data to describe the conversion of XML, JSON or tabular data into RDF. The first challenge of the project consists in making possible the dialog of heterogeneous data sources, coming from four different library softwares: Clavis, Erasmo, SBNWeb and BIBLIOWin 5.0web The type of linked data is also different: bibliographic data, multimedia content, and archival data managed using xDams software. The information contained in the catalogs will be interlinked with external data sources, in particular Wikidata, VIAF, LoC and BNF authority files, Wikipedia and Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. All this will make possible not only the connection of the information available within the CoBiS network with the rest of the world, but also will make CoBiS libraries actually visible and accessible online. Partners of the CoBiS LOD Project are: National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), Turin Academy of Sciences, Olivetti Historical Archives Association, Alpine Club National Library, Deputazione Subalpina di Storia Patria, National Institute for Metrological Research (INRIM). The technical realization of the project is entrusted to Synapta, and it is partially sponsored by Piedmont Region. In its first step, it aims to promote in particular local holdings, without excluding in the near future a wider participation both on institutional and territorial level

An Exploratory Empirical Assessment of Italian Open Government Data Quality With an eye to enabling linked open data

Context The diffusion of Linked Data and Open Data in recent years kept a very fast pace. However evidence from practitioners shows that disclosing data without proper quality control may jeopardize datasets reuse in terms of apps, linking, and other transformations. Objective Our goals are to understand practical problems experienced by open data users in using and integrating them and build a set of concrete metrics to assess the quality of disclosed data and better support the transition towards linked open data. Method We focus on Open Government Data (OGD), collecting problems experienced by developers and mapping them to a data quality model available in literature. Then we derived a set of metrics and applied them to evaluate a few samples of Italian OGD. Result We present empirical evidence concerning the common quality problems experienced by open data users when using and integrating datasets. The measurements effort showed a few acquired good practices and common weaknesses, and a set of discriminant factors among datasets. Conclusion The study represents the first empirical attempt to evaluate the quality of open datasets at an operational level. Our long-term goal is to support the transition towards Linked Open Government Data (LOGD) with a quality improvement process in the wake of the current practices in Software Qualit

Setting an example: Political leaders' cues and compliance with health policies in the early stages of the Covid‐19 pandemic in Mexico

How do political leaders' cues affect citizen behavior regarding a new and complex issue? We address this question in the context of the early stages of the Covid‐19 pandemic in Mexico, using electoral outcomes and municipal‐level mobility data from Facebook's Movement Range Maps. In March 2020, Mexico's president downplayed constantly the severity of the coming health crisis by continuing his political rallies throughout the country and encouraging people to leave their homes. Using an event‐study analysis, we find that, after the first press conference where his government declared mobility restrictions were not yet necessary, on March 13, citizens' geographic mobility in pro‐government municipalities was higher than in cities where support for the president was less strong. Our results are robust to several specifications and definitions of political support. Moreover, we find evidence that our results are driven by cities with higher media penetration, which implies that they can be attributed to people's reactions to the president's cues rather than to systematic differences in the preferences of his supporters