The European Court of Justice has ruled against a private copying levy in Spain, concluding that it cannot be “”imposed indiscriminately.”
Archive for October 21st, 2010
Public Science Site Launch
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada has launched a new site at publicscience.ca to promote evidence-based policy making supported by scientific evidence.
LAC-Lustre Leadership
Wendy Reynolds has a brief, must-read post on the need for Library and Archives Canada to show greater leadership in preserving Canada’s digital heritage.
Liberals To Launch Major Open Government Policy Initiative
- A commitment to make as many government datasets as possible available to the public online free of charge at opendata.gc.ca in an open and searchable format, starting with Statistics Canada data, including data from the long-form census;
- A commitment to post all Access to Information requests, responses, and response times online at accesstoinformation.gc.ca
- A commitment to make information on all government grants, contributions and contracts available through a searchable, online database at accountablespending.gc.ca
- A commitment to immediately restore the long-form census
The open government/open data commitment is particularly noteworthy since it will apparently include a direction to all federal departments and agencies to adopt an open government principle where the default position is to provide information to the public. The plans for access to information would also be enormously helpful, including restoring the CAIRS database and following the recent UK lead by making all documents released under ATI available online.