Which policy objectives?

I fully agree on the need to overcome this re-use purpose dilemma when dealing with content held by public administrations and not subject to copyright. Not authorizing commercial re-use could strongly limit dissemination opportunities, especially when content holders do not (or cannot, in some cases) have a perfect awareness of what happens downstream. This would somehow contradict the initial purpose to increase openness.

And yes, I don't see any solid economic rationale (not even from the single point of view of public administrations) in limitating re-users chance to make profits. On the contrary, having contents available for anyone, commercial re-users would have to “design around” and bring significant value added to be able to place products and services. As a final user, I would have two complementary choices, depending on my needs: I could directly draw on public administration to obtain “source” contents and/or buy products or services from innovative re-users (competing with each other).

Of course downstream competition could be seriously narrowed by unfair access to complementary assets. But this could be true irrespective to the choice of releasing content and it is indeed a matter of regulation. We could also see it in that way: letting a new value chain based on open public content arise could highlight market failures otherwise “hidden”.

Even though, as we all know, there is no single recipe working well in any sector, it would indeed be interesting to assess whether licenses preventing commercial re-use are “superior”. Among the questions, we should ask ourselves (and the content holders, of course) which policy goals are pursued by releasing contents and in which measure those goals are reflected when designing licensing schemes.

Regards,

Raimondo