Category: Laws & Policies

A responsible open data initiative must respect the privacy of individuals by not putting the personal data of members of the public at risk. Oman has a variety of laws that protect the privacy of users and that must be taken into consideration by publishers of open data.

First of all, article 36 of the Basic Statute of the State, i.e. the Omani Constitution, protects the right to private life as a constitutional right. Secondly, Oman has a comprehensive Personal Data Protection Law that grants data subjects several rights and imposes on data controllers and data processors a variety of obligations. Thirdly, the Penal Law and the Cybercrime Law both criminalise certain activities that violate the privacy of individuals.

In addition to these general provisions, the release of certain personal data is regulated in the banking sector by article 70 of the Banking Law, in regard to electronic transactions and electronic certification services by article 43 of the Electronic Transactions Law, in the telecom sector by the TRA Data Protection Guidelines, and in the health sector by article 33 of the Medical Profession Law.

Depending on the sector to which the data belongs, the publisher of the data must be aware of the relevant legal provisions restricting release.

Data publishers must consider the classification requirements of government records in order to determine the public sector data that can be legally released.

The Law on the Classification of State Records and the Governance of Protected Places governs the classification of government information. This law sets out four classification categories for public documents: top secret, secret, restricted, and confidential. Broadly speaking, the different classifications are aimed at protecting national security and public interest and are not aimed at classifying all workings of the government.

This law does not expressly recognise “open” or “public” as a category under which government information may be classified. Equally, the law does not prohibit an unclassified document from being made public. Therefore, government employees play an important role in identifying the amount of government data capable of being made open or public by avoiding overclassification.

Any open data initiative must consider copyright law. This law sets out the rules for protecting a wide variety of works, including public sector data.

As a general rule, a copyright protected work may not be used without the consent of the copyright owner. However, article 4(a) of the Omani Copyright Law excludes “official documents” from copyright protection making them automatically legally open. This allows members of the public to use official documents for both commercial and non-commercial purposes, without the need to seek anyone’s permission and without the need to rely on an open licence.

A concept of “free uses” is set out in article 20 of the law which allows members of the general public to use copyright-protected works without the need to seek anyone’s permission in specific circumstances. For example, article 20(1) allows quoting a protected work for illustration or criticism without the need to obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Notwithstanding the official document exclusion and the free uses concept, the adoption of open licences is encouraged since the law does not provide specific guidance on what government works would qualify as an official document and since the grounds for free use are limited.

The Records and Archives Law has a number of indirect implications on open data. This law provides a formal mechanism for requesting the government to release its records and archives.

The law permits members of the public to request access to government records after 30 years from its creation or formal archiving. This period is extended to 60 or 100 years for certain categories of information. The law places restrictions on the use of information obtained under this law specifically and does not allow its use for commercial purposes.

Even though this law is useful for accessing government data, it should not be seen as a restriction on the ability of the government to release open data. This law regulates the instances where members of the public have to right to request access to government documents, whereas open data relates to instances where the government voluntarily publishes its data on the internet. These are closely related concepts, but restrictions on one of them should not be assumed to apply to the other.

The Open Government Licence is the legal instrument that sets the conditions for using open data published on Omani government websites. This licence allows members of the public to use government data for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. Users of the data are required to attribute the source of the data and, if possible, link to it. It also permits the users to circumvent technological measures, such as DRM, if these measures prohibit the user from utilising the data.

The Open Data Policy sets the government’s preferred approach to open data and the licensing rules that government bodies should strive to adopt. The Open Data Policy is not a legal instrument and is only intended to encourage a uniform approach to open data.