Spain Working to End PSI Exclusive Agreements

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Posted by Mary Gianoli on 28 Dec 2009

Madrid: 22 December 2009

The European Commission has awarded contracts to undertake studies to assess the existence of exclusive agreements in the context of the PSI Directive 2003/98/EC in nine Member States including Spain.

Proyecto Aporta, the Spanish PSI re-use information service, has published the first in what will be a series of Blog postings on exclusive agreements and discussing the Spanish study on exclusive agreements.

The title of the Aporta Blog posting: 'Se acerca el fin de los acuerdos exclusivos' (The ending of exclusive agreements) (English translation below) (Spanish text online).

"Re-users continue to experience problems due to the existence of exclusive agreements – a business model which allows some companies an unfair advantage in terms of access to public information for commercial re-use, even sometimes allowing the existence of monopoly situations.

Under the PSI Directive 2003/98/EC and the Spanish transposition of the PSI Directive Law 37/2007, exclusive agreements are only permitted in cases where the service is of public interest. In addition, in these exception cases, the agreement must be transparent and information about it made public, as well as the agreement must be reviewed periodically to ensure that it meets the criteria for allowing such an exception. More information about exclusive agreement exceptions is available in chapter 2 of the Proyecto Aporta ‘Guide to re-using Public Sector Information’.

The Spanish Law 37/2007 stipulates that the existing exclusive agreements that don’t qualify for the exemption under article 6 must be terminated at the end of the contract and in any case the deadline for the phasing out of exclusive agreements was the 31 December 2008.

Reference is made to the PSI Roundtable discussions, which was part of the Foro Internacional de Contenidos Digitales 2009 (FICOD 2009) Conference (International Forum of Digital Contents 2009) held 17–19 November 2009 in Madrid. During the discussions, Juan Pelegrín, European Commission, talked about steps that the European Commission is taking to end exclusive agreements including a series of specific studies in nine Member States. The list of companies undertaking the exclusive agreement studies is as follows.

Austria: Preslmayr Rechtsanwaelte OG
Belgium: Citadel Consulting
Czech Republic: European Projects and Management Agency
Denmark: A9 Consulting ApS
France: SERDA sas
Italy: Alessandro Di T33 snc Valenza & Partners
Germany: GEOkomm Verband der GeoInformationswirtschaft
Poland: Cities on Internet Association
Spain: Universidad Complutense de Madrid

The objectives of the exclusive agreement studies as described in the tender and negotiation process for the study contracts are described as follows.

Identify key areas of public sector information that may occur in the exclusive arrangements (legal, meteorological, commercial register, etc.).
Conduct a survey, at national and regional levels, a minimum of 100 public entities, considering types of information identified above.
Consult with a minimum of 200 re-users of information to validate the results.
Prepare a report highlighting the number of possible exclusive arrangements
Provide a list of public authorities where it is thought could be made exclusive arrangements and conduct a fact sheet of each, providing a proper legal analysis in this regard.

In Spain, the organisation contracted to conduct the exclusive agreements study is the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The study will be conducted over a 16 week period. During this time Proyecto Aporta will continue to report on progress of the study. Proyecto Aporta encourages everyone to discuss their experiences with the exclusive agreements and to support the study.

Proyecto Aporta supports the European Commission study and efforts to achieve a genuine opening up of public sector information for all potential commercial re-users on an equal and fair basis to ensure that the full economic value that the re-use market offers can be exploited."

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