Legal Issues and Economic Exploitation of Open Government Data

This paper is an overview on the state of the art of the Open Data Phenomena in the EU focused on legal issue and business exploitation of the PSI re-use. After an introduction concerning the European Commission Strategy Europe 2020 and the Digital Agenda for Europe, the research specifically deals with Action 3 of the first pillar of Digital Agenda for Europe «open up public data resources for re-use». The paper examines the legislation referring to the re-use of PSI in between de lege lata (2003, PSI Directive) and the legal issues arising from de lege ferenda (2011, Open Data Package). The analysis considers also some special issues like the anonymization and the de-anonymization of data. Furthermore the survey considers the business opportunities arising from the disclosure of the PSI.