The Guardian's Free Our Data campaign has notched up a victory in its quest to ensure the consolidated law of the land is available for every citizen free of charge.
The Statute Law Database has been an ongoing government project for the past decade, eating up hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money. In spite of this, officials at the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) had said the database would be run using a commercial strategy that would charge users for accessing the laws of the land (Access denied to the laws that govern us, August 17).
The change of position came via an email, seen by the Guardian, sent by Clare Allison, the enquiry system project manager at the Statute Publication Office to testers of the Statute Law Database.
In it she says: "We are also pleased to announce that the website as it stands will be launched free to the public once piloting has been completed. A commercial strategy will still be developed next year, but will be looking at options that concern the commercial reuse of the data and the development of functionality that will serve the needs of the specialist user."
The UK is unusual in keeping secret and exercising strict copyright control over the consolidated law. Canada, Australia and the US all provide free access to the raw statute law data and there is either no copyright, or it is waived.
Roger Cook, chairman of the British and Irish Law Librarians Association welcomed the news of free access, albeit cautiously. "It's great that the database will now be free of charge but we need to keep an eye on it. The way this is worded it still leaves them the option to charge for it."
Francis Irving, the software developer who won two New Statesman New Media awards for his sites writetothem.com (Contribution to Civic Society Award) and pledgebank.com (Advocacy Award), believes the DCA's commitment to open access ought to go further.
"While it is welcome that the DCA are making the service free to the public at the point of use, it is still outrageous that they are considering charging for redistribution of the law of the land. The consolidated law should be redistributable under the same crown copyright waiver as the acts are themselves.
There is not only the moral case that we should be free to make copies of the laws that bind us, but also the practical case that free redistribution would create lots of exciting legal information products and services, making it easier for us all to understand the law."
It is understood that all the functions on the beta test version of the legal database will be provided free of charge. This would includes the ability to search for laws as they were passed by parliament as well as version histories that would show the law as it stood at any point in time since 1991.
"Based on these plans, we expect to be able to make the service available for general use by December," says Alfred Bacchus, a spokesman for the DCA.
The second phase of testing for the law database ended in September. The third and final phase is expected to have more than 100 testers drawn from a wider audience including members of the public.
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