Why Public Interest Trumps Trade Secrecy

Most companies have a natural tendency to keep details of their activities secret -- the fear being that competitors might be able to exploit for commercial advantage the information that they obtain. But it may be in the public interest for some details to be released, even if this might prove inconvenient for the company concerned. That's the background to a letter sent by ten law professors, including Larry Lessig, to the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, pointed out to us by infojustice.org. 

On Techdirt.

Oh Irony, Thy Name is Westminster

This is rich:

House of Commons officials have today called in the police to hunt down the mole who leaked details of MPs expenses.

The parliamentary officials spent the morning in talks with Scotland Yard, and made the decision this afternoon.

In a statement, officials said: "The House authorities have received advice that there are reasonable grounds to believe a criminal offence may have been committed in relation to the way in which information relating to Members' allowances has been handled.

Now, since said leak has shown probably several hundred "reasonable grounds" that fraud has been committed, might it not be a priority to investigate those first? And might it not look a little vindictive simply going after the leaker? And might not all this sorry saga be a rather strong argument for introducing a public interest defence for such leaks?

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A Huge Leap *Back* for Transparency

One of the fundamental rules in an open, democratic society is that government must be transparent to be truly accountable: if you can't see who is doing what, there's no hope of fingering the wrong-doers. Against that background, this is a huge slap in the face of the European Union's citizens:

Marco Cappato MEP asked the Council to provide him the contract concluded by the Council and Microsoft, and the Study on the Open Source realized by the interinstitutional committee on informatics in 2005.

...


The Council negative answer was motivated saying that "because these contracts establish specific terms and conditions for the European institutions, the divulgation of those information could jeopardize the protection of commercial interest of Microsoft. Acknowledging that the divulgations of the records are not backed by a clear public interest, the Secretariat general concludes that the protection of Microsoft's commercial interests, being one of the commercial partners of the European institutions, prevails on the divulgation for the public interest".

Got that? "Protection of Microsoft's commercial interests ... prevails on the divulgation for the public interest." Microsoft's profits are more important to the European Council than the public interest of 300 million EU citizens....