Petition - Public - Geo Data

[Panagiotis Kranidiotis]

Declaration
We the undersigned, ask Members of the European Parliament to adequately amend or, failing that, to reject the current draft of the INSPIRE Directive on European Spatial Data Infrastructure because it:

 * Does not guarantee that European citizens and businesses can download and freely re-use Geographic Information collected by government.
 * Instead it entrenches a policy of charging citizens for information they have already paid to collect, enforced by state copyright over geographic information.
 
Given that:  

 * Public Geographic Information is the bedrock of how civil society is managed in the information age.
 * Free map data could enable a new generation of location-based technologies with enormous economic and social potential.
 * Open access to geodata is the best way to ensure co-operation between Europe's government agencies on environmental and census data, and in other important fields.

The INSPIRE Directive in its current form risks holding back the economic and social potential in maps and location-based technology in Europe by many years.