Openlaws.Eu: Synthesis Report
Creators: name: van der Graaf, Shenja
name: Marsden, Chris
name: Passani, Antonella
name: Dini, Paolo
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2016

description: This report provides an initial summary of the legal open data stakeholder mapping at EU level and in the UK and The Netherlands. The case studies relied on a Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) framework in order to identify the key components of the problem and provide the key specifications for the system that is being built, as well as on a combination of desk research, in-depth interviews, and focus groups.

• Although European legal information may not be as widely reused and repurposed as US federal law, it is nevertheless a best-of-breed example for the Member States to emulate where possible.

• It may be argued that UK legal data is generally open to reuse and access with the exception of case law restrictions – where a virtuous open data circle has been hampered by legacies of closed copyright in the gift of individual judges and in practice their clerks, which remains unreformed. This led to restrictively licensed underfunded systems belonging to legal educational charities BAILII and ICLR. Reforms to case law release and funding would enable the UK to be seen as a ‘best of breed’ open legal data example.

• For The Netherlands, it is clear that there are forces challenging the status quo of the current legal information market. Netherlands is a pioneer in the open (legal) data movement, enjoys a solid network of universities for a country its size, has a long-standing history of embracing professional publishing houses (e.g. Kluwer, Elsevier) who have started developing new business models, and has generally sophisticated users who are keen to experiment with new models (e.g. digital library licensing etc). Cable broadband and uptake of 4G mobile technology has vastly contributed to the digitalization of legal information. Dutch government has played a fundamental role opening up legal resources in the early days of the Internet and is today committed to the implementation of Open Access policies, especially for publicly-funded research. Further, it also supports Open Data policies for legal information.

The report presents and discusses a value network-based perspective at business modelling, along with an initial set of community governance principles. The underlying logic when applying the value network approach to technological innovation such as the OpenLaws solution is that it is not the technology as such that is a determinant of success, but rather the way in which the network of actors is configured in generating added value around the technology.

For the governance framework of the OpenLaws community we seek the development of an effective and legitimate governance ecosystem by proposing a distributed yet coordinated framework that can accommodate a plurality of existing and emerging decision-making approaches, and that enables inclusion and participation, independent of notions of public-private memberships, by embracing new kinds of collaboration between and among institutions and actors across borders and sectors. A community based approach is also important for supporting technological innovation.

Some reflections are offered on the basis of capitalism in the form of the medium of exchange as a precious commodity, and on how making this unspoken ontological assumption explicit may open new horizons for alternative and complementary economic systems better suited to harbour societal value creation based on the BOLD and PSI commons on par with market activity.