JRC Integrated Database of the European Energy System (IDEES) published
Tom Brown
System) was published over the last few days:
http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC112474
Quote: "JRC-IDEES is an open source complete data-box of the energy
system and all associated factors, which is fully compliant with the
EUROSTAT energy balances. It has been developed by the European
Commission's Joint Research Centre and will be updated on an annual
basis. JRC-IDEES offers a consistent set of disaggregated
energy-economy-environment historical time series from the year 2000
onwards for all EU Member States, thereby providing in a single database
all information necessary for a deep understanding of the dynamics of
the European energy sector as to better analyse the past and to create a
robust basis for assessing possible future evolutions."
However, after following a thorny proliferation of links and redirects
and logging into the "Research Collaboration Portal" with the ECAS
system I got an error:
"The requested resource was not found.
https://rcp.jrc.es/c/portal/login?p_l_id=10184
"
Given that the data is released under the "European Commission Reuse and
Copyright Notice"
http://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/licence/com_reuse
can somebody who has access just put it somewhere useful and permanent
like Zenodo?
The above reuse licence is suspiciously brief "Reuse is authorised,
provided the source is acknowledged", with a reference to the EC decision
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32011D0833
I presume this is roughly equivalent to CC-BY? I'm fairly sure there are
edge cases where they will be incompatible. Should we be pressuring them
to put a standard licence on the data?
The EUROSTAT energy balances referred to are here:
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/energy/data/energy-balances
Best,
Tom
--
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Institute for Automation and Applied Informatics (IAI)
Dr. Tom Brown
Energy System Modelling
Phone: +49 721 608 25737
Fax: +49 721 608 22602
Website: https://www.iai.kit.edu/
Personal website: https://nworbmot.org/
Visitor Address:
Office 309
Campus North Building 445
Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1
76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen
Giorgio Balestrieri
you have been granted access to the JRC-IDEES project space on the Research Collaboration Portal (RCP), and you should now be able to access this data using your login for the RCP by selecting JRC-IDEES under "My Projects"
Robbie Morrison
Hi Tom, all
Clearly a very useful database technically
but not in fact legally open.
So your suggestion that extracted data would be inbound compatible with a CC-BY-4.0 license is incorrect.
The two issues are a potential copyright
in the database and a potential sui generis right also in the
database, both in relation to European law.
The copyright notice you linked to (cited here as JRC 2018) would only apply if the database represented a sufficiently creative collection. That is unlikely but not impossible. But if copyright did apply, European Commission policy on "reuse" would then also apply (European Commission 2011). But that "reuse" is not what you imagine. The term is defined in article 3.2 thus (emphasis added):
'reuse' means the use of documents by persons or legal entities of documents, for commercial or non-commercial purposes other than the initial purpose for which the documents were produced.
(Actually, I don't understand why the wording "of documents" is
present.)
So, given that the IDEES database attracts copyright, there is no right to republish its contents and your Zotero suggestion is also invalidated.
The other legal issue is that of a database
right. If the JRC made a significant investment (and they
almost certainly would have) in the database (as opposed to the
data itself) then they would automatically be protected against
users extracting a significant part of that database. Conversely,
users have the right, under the 1996 database directive as
transposed into national law, to download, use, and republish
("extract and re-utilize" is the legal phrasing) an insignificant
amount. So your Zotero suggestion to replicate
the contents of the entire database in that site is again in
trouble. There is some legal analysis on what constitutes
"signifcant" in this context but the concept is far from clear.
There is an unresolved debate at present as to whether a database right should, can, or will apply to public sector information.
Standing back, the current situation presented by the IDEES database is a legal mess and clearly impedes open science, open government, and the development of a downstream data ecosystem.
The simple answer is to add a
data-suitable OKI approved open license or alternatively
a public domain dedication. That would address both copyright
and the database right. We modelers could then concentrate on exploring
low carbon trajectories and involving the public to help guide
decisions and improve acceptance. But instead we are left with
the task of pressuring the JRC to adopt open licensing. This is
a pity really because the information contained in the IDEES
database looks will resolved and technically useful.
Thanks for posting and having a first
cut at the legal analysis. HTH, Robbie
References
European Commission (14 December 2011). “Commission decision of 12 December 2011 on the reuse of Commission documents — 2011/833/EU — Document 32011D0833”. Official Journal of the European Union. L 330: 39–42.
JRC (2018). European Commission Reuse and Copyright Notice (for the Joint Research Centre Data Catalogue). JRC, European Commission. Brussels, Belgium. Same notice also used by IDEES (Integrated Database of the European Energy System).
-- Robbie Morrison Address: Schillerstrasse 85, 10627 Berlin, Germany Phone: +49.30.612-87617
Tom Brown
Doesn't it hinge on the word "use"? As a native speaker, I would think
that republishing the data on a platform of my choice counts as a "use"
of the data. Since they don't define what "use" is, aren't we just left
with looking it up in the dictionary?
Thanks for your detailed reply, I was thinking of writing "I'm sure
Robbie will now provide us with a comprehensive legal analysis" but
didn't want to put you under any pressure :-).
Best,
Tom
On 08/08/18 18:40, Robbie Morrison wrote:
> Hi Tom, all
>
> So your suggestion that extracted data would be inbound compatible with
> a CC-BY-4.0 license is incorrect.
>
> The two issues are a potential copyright in the database and a potential
> sui generis right also in the database, both in relation to European law.
>
> That is unlikely but not impossible. But if copyright did apply,
> European Commission policy on "reuse" would then also apply (European
> Commission 2011). But that "reuse" is not what you imagine. The term is
> defined in article 3.2 thus (emphasis added):
>
> documents, for *commercial or non-commercial purposes* other than
>
>
>
> (Actually, I don't understand why the wording "of documents" is present.)
>
> So, given that the IDEES database attracts copyright, there is no right
> to republish its contents and your Zotero suggestion is also invalidated.
>
> database (as opposed to the data itself) then they would automatically
> be protected against users extracting a significant part of that
> database. Conversely, users have the right, under the 1996 database
> directive as transposed into national law, to download, use, and
> republish ("extract and re-utilize" is the legal phrasing)an
> is some legal analysis on what constitutes "signifcant" in this context
> but the concept is far from clear.
>
> There is an unresolved debate at present as to whether a database right
> should, can, or will apply to public sector information.
>
> Standing back, the current situation presented by the IDEES database is
> a legal mess and clearly impedes open science, open government, and the
> development of a downstream data ecosystem.
>
> copyright and the database right. We modelers could then concentrate on
> exploring low carbon trajectories and involving the public to help guide
> decisions and improve acceptance. But instead we are left with the task
> of pressuring the JRC to adopt open licensing. This is a pity really
> because the information contained in the IDEES database looks will
> resolved and technically useful.
>
> Thanks for posting and having a first cut at the legal analysis. HTH, Robbie
>
> European Commission (14 December 2011). “Commission decision of 12
> December 2011 on the reuse of Commission documents — 2011/833/EU —
> Document 32011D0833”
> /Official Journal of the European Union/. *L 330*: 39–42.
> JRC (2018). European Commission Reuse and Copyright Notice (for the
> Joint Research Centre Data Catalogue)
> Commission/. Brussels, Belgium. Same notice also used by IDEES
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Robbie Morrison
Hi Tom, all
Does European Commission reuse include the right to republish?
Interesting point. I have no definitive answer. The following discussion assumes that copyright applies to the extracted dataset in question. As mentioned earlier, that is unlikely, and hence an anonymous user is therefore able to do whatever they like within the confines of the user rights accorded by the sui generis database right, which almost certainly does apply under current Commission policy.
Copyright law and doctrines predate the information age, so that many foundation principles transfer with difficulty to recent developments like software, digital data, and the web.
To start, Wikipedia states (Copyright) (yes I know Wikipedia is not a legal authority but much of its legal information is very good):
The basic right when a work is protected by copyright is, that the holder may determine and decide how and under what conditions the protected work may be used by others.
So the copyright holder can determine if the right to use includes the right to republish or not.
More specifically, the “reuse” (also “re-use”) concept under discussion is present in several European Commission publications concerning public sector information (PSI) (European Commission 2003, 2011, 2013, 2018), while directive 2003/98/EC (European Commission 2003) provides some core definitions. In this context, “reuse” applies to “documents” with the latter including datasets as follows (article 2) (emphasis added):
‘re-use’ means the use by persons or legal entities of documents held by public sector bodies, for commercial or non-commercial purposes other than the initial purpose within the public task for which the documents were produced. …
‘document’ means: (a) any content whatever its medium (written on paper or stored in electronic form or as a sound, visual or audio-visual recording); (b) any part of such content;
(Note that the earlier “of documents” mystery is solved, those two words appear to be a drafting typo!)
Recital 20 (European Commission 2003:92) of directive 2003/96/EC suggests that “re-use” can cover general publication, albeit under an exclusive license (or perhaps the drafters thought such a license would necessarily specify the right to publish). Whereas article 6 which describes the principles underpinning charging for supplied documents would suggest the opposite: that PSI users would not be able to lawfully copy and share material with others.
More informally, the four free software freedoms, first articulated by Richard Stallman, comprise inspect, use, improve, and share. Hence use and share are distinct and different under this scheme (actually "use" or alternative run was added later and is one reason why it is designated freedom zero).
Conversely, the US doctrine of "fair use" does enable allow republication in certain limited circumstances. So use includes republication under this provision.
Finally (as Tom pointed out offlist), the JRC copyright notice requires that “the source is acknowledged”. That implies but does not state explicitly that republication is considered.
In summary, where uncertainty exists — and it clearly does in relation to whether European Commission “reuse” includes the right to republish — many researchers and/or their institutions will naturally err on the side of caution.
Sensible user rights for PSI digital data would therefore include:
- the right to inspect
- the right to reproduce, namely make local transient (RAM) and persistent (file system) copies
- the right to use, including machine-process
- the right to modify, including the creation of close copies, combined works, and sufficiently different new works
- the right to distribute extracted data in original or modified state to third parties or the public at large
- ditto for any results derived from the numerical processing said data
Most of the above can be cleaned up with the application of open licenses or public domain dedications by official providers. Or, better still, changes to intellectual property law to provide positive open content rights.
References
European Commission (31 December 2003). “Directive 2003/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 November 2003 on the re-use of public sector information”. Official Journal of the European Union. L 345: 90–106.
European Commission (14 December 2011). “Commission decision of 12 December 2011 on the reuse of Commission documents — 2011/833/EU — Document 32011D0833”. Official Journal of the European Union. L 330: 39–42.
European Commission (27 June 2013). “Directive 2013/37/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 June 2013 amending Directive 2003/98/EC on the re-use of public sector information (text with EEA relevance)”. Official Journal of the European Union. L 175: 1—8.
European Commission (24 July 2014). “Commission notice: guidelines on recommended standard licences, datasets and charging for the reuse of documents”. Official Journal of the European Union. C 240: 1–10.
European Commission (21 March 2017). H2020 Programme: guidelines to the rules on open access to scientific publications and open access to research data in Horizon 2020 — Version 3.2. Brussels, Belgium: European Commission Directorate-General for Research and Innovation.
European Commission (25 April 2018). Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the re-use of public sector information (recast) — COM (2018) 234 final. Brussels, Belgium: Council of the European Union.
OECD (2007). OECD principles and guidelines for access to research data from public funding. Paris, France: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Stephens, Katharine (8 February 2005). British Horseracing Board v William Hill. Bird & Bird. London, United Kingdom. Legal blog.
2017 PSI submission
Should people think I am being unnecessarily hard on the JRC for not having resolved the legal issue to our satisfaction, let me repeat what 39 open modelers submitted to the European Commission in late 2017. The JRC is part of the Commission. Quoting section 6.9 (paragraph 74) from Morrison et al (2017:15–16) in its entirety:
6.9 European Commission JRC data policy
The European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) plans to make part of its Integrated Database of the European Energy Sector (IDEES) public in late-2017 Wiesenthal (2017). The database will initially span the years 2000–2018 for all member states. Dataset licensing is to be governed by the JRC policy on data, namely that the “acquisition of data by the JRC from third parties shall, where possible and feasible, be governed by the Open Data principles, and all efforts shall be made to avoid imposition of restrictions to their access and use by the JRC and subsequent users” (Doldirina et al 2015:6). The Open Data principles however remain silent on the right of public users to distribute original and modified works (ibid:6). With regard to Commission-sourced data, some kind of attribution license, perhaps the EU reuse and copyright notice (European Commission 2011), has been suggested Zucker (2017). The Commission needs to finalise which open licenses it intends to use for these datasets. Metadata is to follow the JRC Data Policy Implementation Guidelines but, as of October 2017, these guidelines are not public.
Moreover, recommendation 7 to the Commission requests that (page 3, paragraph 10) (emphasis added):
The European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) needs to finalise its policies on energy sector data licensing and metadata practices (section 6.9).
My reading is that
the Commission has been working on these issues for some time,
but committing to open licensing has proved difficult.
References
Doldirina, Catherine, Anders Friis-Christensen, Nicole Ostlaender, Andrea Perego, Alessandro Annoni, Ioannis Kanellopoulos, Massimo Craglia, Lorenzino Vaccari, Giacinto Tartaglia, Fabrizio Bonato, Paul Triaille Jean, and Stefano Gentile (2015). JRC data policy — Report EUR 27163 EN. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. ISBN 978-92-79-47104-9. doi:10.2788/607378.
European Commission (14 December 2011). “Commission decision of 12 December 2011 on the reuse of Commission documents — 2011/833/EU — Document 32011D0833”. Official Journal of the European Union. L 330: 39–42.
Morrison, Robbie, Tom Brown, and Matteo De Felice (10 December 2017). Submission on the re-use of public sector information: with an emphasis on energy system datasets — Release 09. Berlin, Germany. Published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.
Wiesenthal, Tobias (18 May 2017). POTEnCIA and JRC-IDEES: a new modelling toolset for the European energy sector — Presentation. Brussels, Belgium: EMP–E Meeting.
Zucker, Andreas (17 May 2017). Data openness in JRC models — Presentation. Brussels, Belgium: EMP–E Meeting.
HTH, Robbie
Robbie Morrison
Oops. Giorgio Balestrieri pointed out
earlier on this thread that registration is required and hence
the user is not anonymous. One more openness criteria not fulfilled.
Robbie
As mentioned earlier, that is unlikely, and hence an anonymous user is therefore able to do whatever they like within the confines of the user rights accorded by the sui generis database right, which almost certainly does apply under current Commission policy.
Florian Dierickx
- The (aggregated) EU ETS data is hosted on the website of the EEA: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/european-union-emissions-trading-scheme-6#tab-metadata.
- Licencing statement: EEA standard re-use policy: unless otherwise indicated, re-use of content on the EEA website for commercial or non-commercial purposes is permitted free of charge, provided that the source is acknowledged (https://www.eea.europa.eu/legal/copyright). Copyright holder: European Commission, European Environment Agency (EEA).
- As the European Commission is the copyright holder, I assume this is identical to the licencing of the IDEES dataset.. ?
- The 'core' team of data maintainers of datahub.io uploaded the same dataset (with subsequent updates) to https://datahub.io/core/eu-emissions-trading-system#data-cli
- Licencing: ODC-PDDL-1.0
- I am not an expert in licences, maybe Robbie you could shine, again, your light whether this is an appropriate/logical/useable licence for academic / private / ... use? =)
- Cludius, J. (2018). Winners and Losers of EU Emissions Trading: Insights from the EUTL Transfer Dataset. Economics of Energy & Environmental Policy, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.5547/2160-5890.7.2.jclu
- Cludius, J., & Betz, R. (2016). EU Emissions Trading: The Role of Banks and Other Financial Actors Insights from the EU Transaction Log and Interviews (SML Working Paper No. 12). Winterthur, Switzerland: ZHAW School of Management and Law.
- Duscha, V. (2018). The EU ETS and Dynamic Allocation in Phase IV—An Ex-Ante Assessment. Energies, 11(2), 409. https://doi.org/10.3390/en11020409
- European Environment Agency, European Topic Centre for Air pollution and Climate change Mitigation, Gores, S., Cludius, J., Graichen, V., Healy, S., … Zell-Ziegler, C. (2018a). EU Emissions Trading System data viewer: Background note. Copenhagen: EEA. Retrieved from https://www.eea.europa.eu/ds_resolveuid/32f7162f3daa406d9a675c9e497ee0bc
- European Environment Agency, European Topic Centre for Air pollution and Climate change Mitigation, Gores, S., Cludius, J., Graichen, V., Healy, S., … Zell-Ziegler, C. (2018b). EU Emissions Trading System data viewer: User manual. Copenhagen: EEA. Retrieved from https://www.eea.europa.eu/ds_resolveuid/2462d23b1bbb40faba39dafce430c1c8
- Gores, S., Graichen, V., European Environment Agency, & European Topic Centre for Air pollution and Climate change Mitigation. (2016). Attribution of new activity codes for installations with old codes in the EEA’s EU ETS data viewer (p. 25).
- Graichen, V., Cludius, J., & Gores, S. (2017). Estimate of 2005-2012 emissions for stationary installations to reflect the current scope (2013-2020) of the EU ETS (ETC/ACM Technical Paper No. 2017/1) (p. 52). Bilthoven, The Netherlands: European Topic Centre on Air Pollution and Climate Change Mitigation. Retrieved from http://acm.eionet.europa.eu/reports/ETCACM_TP_2017_11_estimates_reflect_current_ETS_scope
- Graichen, V., Cludius, J., Gores, S., & European Topic Centre on Air Pollution and Climate Change Mitigation. (2017). Estimate of historical emissions for stationary installations to reflect the current scope of the EU ETS (2013-2020) (ETC/ACM Technical Paper No. 2017/2) (p. 52). Bilthoven, The Netherlands: European Topic Centre on Air Pollution and Climate Change Mitigation. Retrieved from http://acm.eionet.europa.eu/reports/ETCACM_TP_2017_11_estimates_reflect_current_ETS_scope
- Lavric, L. (2016). Consumption and production indexes: options for contextualising EU GHG emissions data (MPRA Paper No. 71895) (p. 12). Encompass Economics Ltd. Retrieved from https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/71895/
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Robbie Morrison
Hello Florian, all
A very interesting comparative case: the EU ETS (carbon) database
and the IDEES (energy) database. Thanks for raising the idea.
Some legal analysis
Clearly the licensing in each database is different. Moreover, the European Environmental Agency (EEA) and European Commission (EC) are quite separate entities as I understand it. The EEA copyright notice is considerably more permissive than the IDEES copyright notice, the EEA variant stating that (emphasis added) "The re-use of the content on the EEA website covers the reproduction, adaptation and/or distribution, irrespective of the means and/or the format used." That's pretty good because the concept of distribution normally includes making available to the public (although for software, the notion of distribution is considerably more complicated). But I doubt much, if any, of the primary EU ETS data attracts copyright in any case. Notwithstanding, that earlier quoted statement could be interpreted as the EEA implicitly waiving any database right it holds, because there is no mention of an upper bound on extraction? (While noting that that is speculation on my part and not supported by any legal authority.) A database right protects against substantial extraction and re-utilization and would make duplication of the database on datahub.io a civil or even criminal matter. In which case, datahub.io could be exposed to injunctions sought by the rights holder that could potentially strip its domain name, despite being an innocent third party.
An aside: how did you (Florian) determine that the European
Commission holds potential (joint or shared) authorship for the EU
ETS database? I didn't locate any information to indicate that.
The EEA license does add restrictions though, including that
(emphasis added) "the original meaning or message of the
content is not distorted." That alone would make the EEA
conditions not inbound compatible with the ODC-PDDL-1.0. So adding
a public domain dedication is probably not correct, unless
one takes the view that there is no copyright present. I guess
that is the position the "core team" have adopted. One would
imagine that Open Knowledge International (OKI) reviewed these
issues carefully.
But this also highlights the fact that this situation with
unclear policy and absent or non-standard licenses rapidly
degenerates into a legal shambles. Copyright applied to data
together with the database right, with its open-ended definition
of a database, simply do not reflect how data is generated,
assembled, curated, used, improved, and combined in the real
world.
Moreover the failure to clearly identify which data your licensing applies to and which is external and offered under different conditions (described by the EEA as "certain data .. supplied by third-parties") is problematic.
To return to the question of whether the IDEES database could be duplicated on datahub. Transferring a substantial part or all of the IDEES would infringe the Commission's database right (which it almost certainly holds). And I have not seen that right waived anywhere. So no, shifting large chunks of IDEES to an open data host is not a good idea.
For completeness, there are some exceptions for personal
scientific research. I am guessing that Danish and Belgium law
would apply to the EU ETS and IDEES databases, respectively. These
exceptions were written into the 1996 database directive and later
transposed (somewhat unevenly) into national law. But these kind
of research exceptions would certainly not cover large-scale
republication of the type under discussion.
The reproduction, distribution or communication to the public of insubstantial parts of a database is guaranteed by §87e. The right to do this is conferred in the same way that the right to take steps to access a database that would otherwise infringe copyright in conferred by §55a. In the case of databases that have been put into circulation with the maker's consent, any owner of such a copy my reproduce, distribute, or communicate to the public insubstantial parts. Similarly, a person entitled in any other way to make use of the database may do so. In the case of on-line databases, any person who has access to it pursuant to a contract formed with the maker or the maker's authority may take similar action. Contractual provisions to the contrary are invalid.
Under Germany law, a copyright license is a contract (not so in
the US) (Jaeger 2017:26). Hence the rather unusual EEA "not
distorted" provision could not be enforced, should a database
right apply (which it likely does assuming that the right has not
already been implicitly waived as discussed earlier .. catch 22?).
ODC-PDDL-1.0
I was asked to comment on the ODC public domain dedication
(ODC-PDDL-1.0). This is a perfectly reasonable alternative to the
better known Creative Common "Zero" public domain dedication
(CC0-1.0). I am not aware of any significant differences between
the two or good reasons for selecting one over the other.
Closure
The clear solution to all these complications and gray zones is for public sector providers to adopt data-orientated standard open licenses. Rather than a bespoke license in the case of the EU ETS database. Or unclear terms in the case of the IDEES database.
HTH, Robbie
References
Davidson, Mark J (January 2008). The legal protection of databases. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-04945-0. Paperback edition.
Jaeger, Till (18 September 2017). Legal aspects of European energy data — Legal opinion. Berlin, Germany: JBB Rechtsanwälte. (Email Neon for a copy.)
Juris (2018). Act on Copyright and Related Rights (Urheberrechtsgesetz, UrhG) — Amendments to 1 September 2017 — Official translation. Saarbrücken, Germany: Juris.
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-- Robbie Morrison Address: Schillerstrasse 85, 10627 Berlin, Germany Phone: +49.30.612-87617
Tom Brown
Thank you for all your hard work preparing IDEES and thank you for
making the IDEES available to the community. It's wonderful to have such
a well laid out and harmonised dataset for the whole EU; it represents a
big usability improvement on e.g. Odyssee.
In answer to your questions:
1. My institution is the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, a
university; I am a researcher.
2. We plan to use IDEES to model future scenarios for the energy sector
with low greenhouse gas emissions. IDEES will be a drop-in replacement
for the Energy Balances and Odyssee data we were using previously.
3. I heard of JRC-IDEES through the Open Energy Modelling Initiative
(Openmod).
While I am very grateful that you've put IDEES online, I have some
suggestions:
i) *Use a standard open data licence*: The licence
https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/licence/com_reuse does not provide much
clarity on what we are allowed to do with the data. "Reuse" is a broad
term with many possible interpretations. Besides copyright (and it is
not clear that the database can attract copyright) there is also a sui
generis database right which applies, which is not addressed by the licence.
If your intention is to make the data open to third parties and maximise
its impact, you can provide them with legal certainty by using a
data-suitable OKI approved open licence, such as the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC-BY-4.0) licence. These licences make very clear what the
user can do (inspect, reproduce, use, machine-process, modify, make
derivatives, redistribute) and can include requirements for attribution,
like the current IDEES licence. So they are in the same spirit as your
current reuse licence, but legally sound.
There is further discussion of the IDEES licence to be found on the
Openmod mailing list:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openmod-initiative/MNtsdepCnRU
ii) *Do not require registration for downloading*: I know it is useful
for you to be able to track who is using the database, but this is not
compatible with openness. Openness includes the right for third parties
to redistribute the data, so it doesn't make sense to try to control
access. Barriers to access run the risk of reducing the number of
potential users and deterring casual users. Instead, it is possible to
track real users of the data by tracking publications which cite IDEES.
If access is truly open, many people will use this fantastic resource
and cite IDEES; if access is restricted like this, only the most
dedicated users will end up being able to access it and cite it.
iii) *Non-EU countries*: Many studies cover non-EU countries, as did the
Energy Balances. Would it be possible to include non-EU countries in
Europe, e.g. AL, BA, CH, ME, MK, NO, and in future also the UK given
that it will leave the EU shortly?
Many thanks and wishing you a good weekend!
Best wishes,
Tom Brown
On 10/08/18 12:14, JRC-C6-J...@ec.europa.eu wrote:
> Dear Mr. Brown,
>
>
>
> Thank you for your interest in the JRC-IDEES database. You have been
> granted access to the project space on the Research Collaboration Portal
> <https://rcp.jrc.es/> (RCP), where updates and additional materials will
> be posted. Please note that we may occasionally contact you with further
> information and updates related to JRC-IDEES. Reply with "/unsubscribe/"
> to this email in case you do not want to receive such emails.
>
>
>
> The information contained in the "JRC-IDEES-2015_v1.0" folder of the
> Research Collaboration Portal can be used,^1 provided that appropriate
> references are made.^2
>
>
>
> We kindly ask you not to share JRC-IDEES with a wide audience of
> non-registered members of the RCP, but rather invite them to request
> access through registering with the RCP and contacting us at
> JRC-C6-J...@ec.europa.eu <mailto:JRC-C6-J...@ec.europa.eu>.
> Any derivative from JRC-IDEES may be distributed without further
> restrictions, although we would appreciate being informed of this work
> so we may follow any updates.
>
>
>
> To assist in our understanding of the community which is making use of
> JRC-IDEES, we would be grateful if you could answer the following questions:
>
>
>
> 1. What is your organization and your role?
>
> 2. What function do you intend to use JRC-IDEES for?
>
> 3. Where did you hear of the JRC-IDEES?
>
>
>
> Finally, we would welcome your comments and suggestions on how we may
> improve future editions of JRC-IDEES.
>
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
>
>
> The JRC-IDEES team
>
>
>
> ^1 The license related information can be found at
> https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/licence/com_reuse
>
> ^2 JRC-IDEES should be cited as: "Mantzos, Leonidas; Matei, Nicoleta
> Anca; Mulholland, Eamonn; Rózsai, Máté; Tamba, Marie; Wiesenthal, Tobias
> (2018): JRC-IDEES 2015. European Commission, Joint Research Centre
> (JRC) [Dataset] PID: http://data.europa.eu/89h/jrc-10110-10001"
>
>
>
> cid:image0...@01D4308F.2BD2F850*
> **European Commission**
> *DG Joint Research Centre (JRC)*
> *Unit C6 Economics of Climate Change, Energy and Transport*
>
> *Edificio Expo; C/ Inca Garcilaso, 3*
> *E-41092 Sevilla, Spain
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Brown [mailto:tom....@kit.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2018 6:21 PM
> To: JRC C6 JRC IDEES
> Subject: Fwd: [openmod-initiative] Re: JRC Integrated Database of the
> European Energy System (IDEES) published
>
>
>
> Dear Sir/Madam,
>
>
>
> I was unable to access the IDEES data from the RCP using my ECAS login.
>
> Did I do something wrong, or does each user need to apply separately?
>
>
>
> Thank you for your help - I've been looking forward to examining this
>
> resource for some time!
>
>
>
> Best wishes,
>
>
>
> Tom
>
>
>
>
>
> -------- Forwarded Message --------
>
> Subject: [openmod-initiative] Re: JRC Integrated Database
> of the
>
> European Energy System (IDEES) published
>
> Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2018 09:10:53 -0700 (PDT)
>
> From: Giorgio Balestrieri <giorgio.ba...@gmail.com>
>
> To: openmod initiative <openmod-i...@googlegroups.com>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Hi Tom,
>
>
>
> thank you for flagging this dataset, seems interesting.
>
>
>
> It looks like the only link they provide redirects to the landing page
>
> of the JRC Portal.
>
> I sent an email to JRC-C6-J...@ec.europa.eu
>
>
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
>
> Groups "openmod initiative" group.
>
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
>
> an email to openmod-initiat...@googlegroups.com
>
> <mailto:openmod-i...@googlegroups.com>.
> To view this discussion on the web, visit
>
>
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openmod-initiative/e8f3135d-918c-49ac-bc69-ddc114c48676%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.
Florian Dierickx
- EU ETS: the owners of the database are jointly the European Commission and the European Environmental Agency [link: 'Rights' & 'Owners']
- Legal background on ownership/licences referred to [link]:
- 2011/833/EU: Commission Decision of 12 December 2011 on the reuse of Commission documents
- Directive 2013/37/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 June 2013 amending Directive 2003/98/EC on the re-use of public sector information Text with EEA relevance
- JRC IDEES: the owner seems to be the European Commission
- Legal background on ownership/licences referred to [link]:
To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openmod-initiative/753691c7-6bea-e0c5-325f-8169bff4e19f%40posteo.de.
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Robbie Morrison
Hi Florian, all
Thanks for the
update regarding the joint "owners" of the EU ETS database. In
this context, European intellectual property law requires that
owners be split into authors (who hold either classical or
database copyrights) and makers (who hold database rights).
There is no such thing as a generic information owner. Or, put
differently, owners should state exactly what rights they claim
and the associated year/s of commencement.
My reply considers potential changes to the law governing the re-use of public sector information (PSI).
Florian cited three European Commission documents (2003, 2011, 2013) covering the re-use of public sector information. In addition, European Commission (2018) is worth looking at. While still only a proposal, it documents the following noteworthy changes:
- the 2003 and 2013 directives are
discretionary on public bodies but the 2018 proposal (European
Commission 2018:5) seeks to the substantially increase the
obligation to make PSI public
- sui generis database
protection — the intellectual property right that makes
significant or entire clones unlawful — might be withdrawn en
masse for databases provided by public sector bodies: quoting
from European Commission (2018:10) (emphasis added):
Article 1(6) clarifies that the so-called sui generis right protecting makers of databases provided for in Article 7 of Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases cannot be invoked by a public sector body which is the rightholder as a ground to prohibit re-use of the content of the database.
With regard to the sui
generis provision above, there is currently some dispute
as to whether that proposed change represents a clarification or
an alteration of the current legal status. It could well be that
the word "clarifies" in the preceding paragraph is misleading.
If that sui
generis provision does come into force (and there is a
fair chance it will), it should make life a lot easier for
modelers. Indeed, we may see the following situation occur for
technical databases from official sources:
- the database itself is not
under a database right due to the aforementioned changes
to PSI law
- the database is not under copyright because the selection and arrangement of its contents is not sufficiently creative
Just to be clear, the copyright under discussion is the
copyright that attaches to a sufficiently creative database,
sometimes termed "original", which was established under the
1996 database directive and subsequently transposed into
national law. It does not refer to "classical" copyright that
can apply to collections of data — that copyright predates the
database directive and does not require the collection to meet
the legal definition of a database. In short, the discussion
here is limited to databases described by law.
To support the second point above, official databases like the EU ETS and IDEES normally strive to be complete, hence there is little or no selection of their contents involved. And their arrangement is normally sorted in entirely obvious ways (by timestamp, dictionary order, and so on) so that their structure and arrangement lack the level of judgment and creativity needed for copyright to attach. Indeed, European Commission (2017) makes it clear that machine-generated data cannot attract copyright, under the following definition given (page 9) (emphasis added):
Machine-generated data is created without the direct intervention of a human by computer processes, applications or services, or by sensors processing information received from equipment, software or machinery, whether virtual or real.
So that would
include data generated by flow meters, intensive state meters,
and market clearing algorithms and any subsequent automated
sampling, aggregation, and other forms of routine statistical
processing. The IDEES database is a little different in this
regard because it draws on internally consistent energy balances
sourced from eurostat. Resolving those balances would require (I
imagine) considerable human skill and ingenuity. While noting
that the data from eurostat is provided under considerably more
permissive terms (more in a future email) than that offered by
the JRC.
Should the proposed
changes to PSI law outlined above proceed, the only remaining
problem is that my claim of non-copyright for the EU ETS and
IDEES databases is presumed and there is no explicit waiver.
That then presents a barrier to risk-adverse users and their
employing institutions. But the simple answer, as always, is to
apply commonly used data-enabled open licenses!
The fallback
argument, should copyright be claimed, is to assert that that
the right to re-use PSI includes the right to republish with the
proviso that the purpose served must be "other than the
initial purpose within the public task for which the
documents [including databases] were produced" (European
Commission 2003:94) (emphasis added). However that "initial
purpose" condition may well bind when simply cloning an entire
database on a third-party data hosting site (as discussed
earlier on this thread). Moreover it remains unclear (to me at
least) whether "re-use" includes the right to republish and I
have yet to see anything that specifically enables the right to
republish — this is a matter that needs clearing up in any case,
particularly as the proposed PSI sui generis waiver is
likely to be restricted to "re-use" contexts (European
Commission 2018:10).
References
European Commission (10 January 2017). Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: “Building a European data economy” — COM (2017) 9 final. Brussels, Belgium: European Commission.
European Commission (25 April 2018). Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the re-use of public sector information (recast) — COM (2018) 234 final. Brussels, Belgium: Council of the European Union.
European Parliament and European Council (27 March 1996). “Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases”. Official Journal of the European Union. L 77: 20–28.
To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openmod-initiative/CACzU8ZVTDSeKHhtmg1sCdZyk1Q%3DFe-5LnzDrvmNoF2ntNdWNkA%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Eamonn Mulholland
Dear all,
As a member of the JRC-IDEES team, I hope I can provide some clarity on the status of the database and how you can gain access. We have recently posted up instructions on the JRC website on how to gain access to JRC-IDEES (see https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/potencia/jrc-idees), but in brief you must first register with the Research Collaboration Portal (RCP), and then send an email to JRC-C6-J...@ec.europa.eu confirming this registration. Future versions of JRC-IDEES will be uploaded to the RCP, alongside documentation which details the sources and assumptions upon which the database has been built.
As mentioned by users above, we do not facilitate users to access the database without first registering for the time being, although we hope to be able to incorporate the very useful suggestions previously posted in this thread into future versions of JRC-IDEES. Furthermore, we would be happy to receive any feedback/suggestions related to the database and how it might be improved.
Thanks to all for the interest in JRC-IDEES.
Best regards,
Eamonn
On Wednesday, August 8, 2018 at 4:58:40 PM UTC+2, Tom Brown wrote:
Robbie Morrison
Hello Eamonn
I'll respond because no one else has yet!
Your clarification is really useful. I
am sure everyone appreciates you taking the time to post.
One issue, though, is that the term "open" raises expectations among many on this list. Particularly those (myself included) who come from open source software. OSS projects have developed their own particular legal context and ethos. Whether the courts will continue to broadly agree with this position remains an open question, but they have (primarily in relation to GPL litigation) broadly done so thus far.
If you have suggestions as to how members of this list can encourage the JRC to adopt an open license or public domain dedication for the IDEES database, that would be great!
The central problem external modelers
and analysts face is not in relation to local use, even if
gatewayed by the JRC (and I am not suggesting that the JRC would
deny access), but what happens when researchers want to modify
and republish their datasets to support open science and open
government. That's the legal gray area we face at present and
need to resolve.
with best wishes, Robbie
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Barry McMullin
May I also echo Robbie’s remarks: I very much appreciate your
expressed willingness, on behalf of the JRC-IDEES team, to engage
with the openmod community. I also endorse strongly Robbie’s
articulation of the potential benefits to the openmod community -
and society at large - of adoption of an open license or public
domain dedication for the IDEES database.
One point I would like to just pick up in your message. You say:
> ... we hope to be able to incorporate the very useful
> versions of JRC-IDEES.
of a loss to understand why such action should have to await
“future versions”. For me at least, that conjures up a vision of
a potentially lengthy delay (months to years?), with no evident
technical cause, and no particular confidence as to the eventual
outcome. I hope I am quite mistaken in these concerns, and would
appreciate if you could give us some concrete reassurance as to
the timeline on which we might reasonably expect actual change
(as opposed to aspirations of change, welcome as those are).
Kind regards - Barry.
--
Professor Barry McMullin,
School of Electronic Engineering
Dublin City University
phone: +353-1-700-5432
web: http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~mcmullin/
skype: barrymcmullin-dcu.ie
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Eamonn Mulholland
Unfortunately it's tough to give a solid timeline for when we expect to be able to move towards the fully open source version (in the official sense of the word at least) as we are somewhat bound by a combination of constraints. In all cases I'll keep you updated as the process evolves further.
Kind regards,
Eamonn
On Wednesday, August 8, 2018 at 4:58:40 PM UTC+2, Tom Brown wrote:
Robbie Morrison
Hello Eamonn
Many thanks for the update. Not easy
being the messenger, I guess?
I imagine that the IDEES database will
be discussed at the upcoming EMP-E 2018 meeting in Brussels from
25 September 2018. I know several from this list will be
attending, myself included. For those who are not aware, that
event is hosted by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the
European Commission, also the (lead?) developer of IDEES. There
is a parallel session devoted to open databases on the second
day.
with best wishes, Robbie
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