"The Commission proposes to update the 2003 Directive on the re-use of public sector information by: Making it a general rule that all documents made accessible by public sector bodies can be re-used for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, unless protected by third party copyright; Establishing the principle that public bodies should not be allowed to charge more than costs triggered by the individual request for data (marginal costs); in practice this means most data will be offered for free or virtually for free, unless duly justified. Making it compulsory to provide data in commonly-used, machine-readable formats, to ensure data can be effectively re-used. Introducing regulatory oversight to enforce these principles; Massively expanding the reach of the Directive to include libraries, museums and archives for the first time; the existing 2003 rules will apply to data from such institutions."

"We had 8 teams of hacks and hackers digging around the Scottish data beat. ... With this special digger, fire incidents, planning applications, public-owned property and gifts councillors’ received have been mined."