Legislation / 2013 54% open (avg.)

The primary format is XML. Acts and other pieces of legislation can be downloaded for free in different formats including PDF and DOC. Another viable and good source is the Kenya Parliament website: http://www.parliament.go.ke/ in pdf formats too.

The link provided is to bulk XML data for United States Code provided by Office of the Law Revision Counsel for US House of Representatives. Data made available since July 2013 (see this announce http://www.speaker.gov/press-release/opengov-house-representatives-makes-us-code-available-bulk-xml). Regarding open licensing we assume that the US Code is public domain. In addition no copyright assertion is mentioned on the site and the congress.gov site is run by the Library of Congress and one would anticipate is subject to standard public domain provisions (though there is a legal section whose copyright portion is unfortunately rather unenlightening - http://beta.congress.gov/legal/#copyright) There is a variety of additional (machine-readable) data from a variety of sources not least the new Congress.gov website (which will be completely replacing http://thomas.loc.gov/ from November 2013). Other resources include: - Bulk data from the GPO in XML format including Congressional Bills, Commerce Business Daily etc. (Does not seem to be updated since Jan 2013). Announced Jan 10 2013 - see http://www.gpo.gov/pdfs/news-media/press/13news01.pdf - The full US Code on the GPO at: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/collectionUScode.action?collectionCode=USCODE (PDF) - The Federal Register https://www.federalregister.gov/ which includes "Regulations are issued by federal agencies, boards, or commissions [which] explain how [an] agency intends to carry out a law." (Data is provided in HTML, CSV and JSON and there is a full API - see https://www.federalregister.gov/developers/api/v1 and https://www.federalregister.gov/blog/learn/developers) - Resources listed on http://speaker.gov/open including http://docs.house.gov/ (which includes XML versions of laws being considered) and House floor activities at http://clerk.house.gov/floorsummary/floor-download.aspx In addition it is worth noting various unofficial sites that provide excellent material such as: - https://www.govtrack.us/ - http://opencongress.org/ It may also be interesting to read how expensive some of this material once was, see e.g. Carl Malamud's comments in http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/bulk-data-downloads-government-transparency-breakthrough.html

When you perform a search through Retsinformation.dk you can chose the option "Eksporter søgeresultatet" which gives you the search result in CSV - you can search for all documents to get a full CSV bulk download of the metadata of all legislation (although with 77,000 entries this sometimes over-stresses the server - if so make several queries)

Legislation is available in machine readable format (XML) and in bulk (all publicly available legislation) here: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/subscribe

Although the data download page at data.overheid.nl states the date of the data set is Nov 2012, in reality if you download the XML file, it will have a generation date of today. The data is updated daily.

All laws are also available through webinterface at http://wetten.overheid.nl/zoeken/

Laws are not subject to copyright as per §5 UrhG (German copyright act). According to the homepage of gesetze-im-internet.de and to govdata.de, the data can be used free of charge. "Die bereitgestellten Rechtsnormen sind in allen zur Verfügung gestellten Formaten zur freien Nutzung und Weiterverwendung zugänglich gemacht". The table of contents of gesetze-im-internet.de is available in bulk from https://www.govdata.de/suchen/-/details/gesetze-im-internet as one XML-file. http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gii-toc.xml Not all laws are provided timely, see https://www.google.com/search?q=site:gesetze-im-internet.de+%22noch+nicht+ber%C3%BCcksichtigt%22&espv=213&es_sm=93&biw=1920&bih=1043&ei=N6KEUqXBM8mYtAbP74G4DQ&start=0&sa=N

A comprehensive database of UK legislation is maintained online by The National Archives, an agency of the Ministry of Justice. The information is re-usable under the UK's Open Government Licence. -- update after asking National Archives and checking online --- A variety of machine readable formats are available through the API - see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/developer/formats (amended machine-readable to yes and updated formats). Currently the database is not downloadable in bulk. The target is to provide this by end-March 2014

As there is no information on licensing, following the FAQ agreement it would be considered as not openly licensed.

National federal law from http://ris.bka.gv.at available via APIs

No copyright on laws; interpreted that as open license

No copyright on laws; interpreted that as open license

No consolidated texts of the laws. Some consolidated and purified texts are available on unofficial site zakon.hr.

This essential democratic data is readable but still not available in free reusing format.

The up-to-date legislation is available in web portal, but it was not not possible to download. See discussion (in Finnish) http://avoindata.net/210/saako-lainsaadannon-eli-finlexin-avoimena

Now it has been published as linked data. The semantic structure is still work in progress but data is now there and fully open.

OM on ollut viime vuodesta lähtien mukana Aalto-yliopiston Linked Data Finland - hankkeessa. Yhtenä hankkeen osana on lainsäädännön koneluettavan aineiston tuottaminen ja verkkopalvelun valmistelu. Hankkeen rahoitus ei ollut riittävä koko Finlexin uudistetun palvelun tuottamiseen, minkä vuoksi meillä on parhaillaan lisärahoitusta koskeva selvittely meneillään VM:n Avoimen hallinnon toimintaohjelman kanssa. Jotain on jo saatu julkiseen verkkoon ikäänkuin näyteaineistona. Viime viikon lopussa julkaistiin lainsäädäntö- ja oikeuskäytäntöaineistoista ensimmäinen aineistopaketti Linked Data Finland -hankkeen verkkosivuilla www.ldf.fi - osion nimi on hienosti Semantic Finlex ja sen tarkka osoite on http://www.ldf.fi/semantic-finlex.html Semanttista Finlexiä on siis tarkoitus viimeistellä lähikuukausien aikana.

Legislation by law is exempt from copyright and can therefore be considered openly licensed. Statutes are not available in bulk nor can be accessed easily. The bulk version of the legislation is only updated 2-3 times a year.

The complete legislation is available mostly via ( free web interface) to proprietary legal information systems. The State gazette provides pdfs (and some htmls) to the newly promulgated and amended laws and state ordinances The laws are not subject to copyright in Bulgaria.

The data from the cited website is available in a good variety of formats including machine-readable XML but is not available in bulk (you cannot download the entire code at once easily). In terms of open licensing the Terms and Conditions at http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/terms-avis/index.html indicate that non-commercial use is permitted but commercial use is not (you must apply for specific permission). There is also the Parliamentary website at http://www.parl.gc.ca/LegisInfo/ which contains HTML and XML on legislation before Parliament. This material is not openly licensed - the Copyright's Page http://www.parl.gc.ca/ImportantNotices.aspx?Language=E states "The contents of this Web site are covered by the provisions of the Copyright Act and related regulations and international agreements. Permission to reproduce in whole or in part or otherwise use content on this Web site may be sought from the appropriate source." It also links in turn to Speaker Permission page http://www.parl.gc.ca/SpeakerPermission.aspx?Language=E which states "Reproduction of the proceedings of the House of Commons and its Committees, in whole or in part and in any medium, is hereby permitted provided that the reproduction is accurate and is not presented as official. This permission does not extend to reproduction, distribution or use for commercial purpose of financial gain".

According to Law 3861/2010, article 7 /τ.Α΄112 -13.7.2010 all laws, Ministerial Decrees, Presidential Decrees and other regulation of Greece become available online for free through the website of the National Printing Office.

Within each law it is possible to find information when it became available to the public. Not machine readable (.doc & pdf). No visible licence.

"All primary legislation is uploaded by the HM Attorney General's department (cloud hosted open source system as per Jersey) and all secondary legislation is uploaded by the IT department at the Isle of Man Parliament (cloud hosted Microsoft Sharepoint).

All ""live"" primary legislation is available free online. All secondary legislation from 2000 is available free online and all earlier secondary legislation is available free by email (typically within 1 hour)."

Reproduction requires prior written consent, as per http://www.disclaimer.admin.ch/terms_and_conditions.html

I don't know if Normattiva.it is an official source, it could be but I'm not sure. Data can be downloaded individually in a XMLformat. Reviewer comments: - It seems IPZS is the "Government Printing Office of the State" so it's an official source. No license information found on the site which makes it not openly licensed.

The Saudi Embassy page includes 5 links to legislation. The King is also advised by a legislative body called the Consultative Council (Majlis Al-Shura). The Council proposes new laws and amends existing ones. It consists of 150 members who are appointed by the King for four-year terms that can be renewed. Because Saudi Arabia is an Islamic state, its judicial system is based on Islamic law (Shari’ah). The King is at the top of the legal system. He acts as the final court of appeal and can issue pardons. There are also courts in the Kingdom. The largest are the Shari’ah Courts, which hear most cases in the Saudi legal system.

The site contains up-to-date information on legislation but is not bulk or machine-readable (simple HTML). On open license terms and conditions at http://statutes.agc.gov.sg/aol/page.w3p;paId=AOL_PUBLIC_TERMS_CONDITIONS states "(5) Except as otherwise provided, the Contents of this Web Site shall not be reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted or otherwise distributed in any way, without the prior written permission of AGC."

Legally binding is only paper version of statute. Data can be easily scraped from web page. There is a copyright notice so "no" is filled for open license.

There are a process of opening laws initiated by the new legislature that created a direction for electronic communication.

Has metadata about legislation (federal, state and municipal level - even though levels other than federal depend on agreements being made and few are present yet) and also court decision. Users can browse and filter content according to this metadata. Links to the full text are provided, when available, often with multiple sources (eg. the same law on the Presidency's and both Parliament's websites).

The given site eventually points to the Slovenian Official Gazette as at (for example) http://www.uradni-list.si/1/objava.jsp?urlid=200670&stevilka=2999 . This is in HTML and there is no download facility. The licensing conditions at http://www.uradni-list.si/0/legal include (article 14, Google Translate) "All rights to the home page and all subpages Site-official list.si reserved. The information and materials on this website are protected by intellectual property rights upravljavca.Informacije and materials displayed on the Site may be downloaded for your personal use, however, do not change copyright and other notices relating to intellectual property rights or other rights notices. It is permitted to download and print information and materials for viewing and reading for non-commercial purposes. Any other copying, distribution, reproduction, modification information and materials on this site or send them by mail or distribute in any other way without prior written permission is prohibited. It is also prohibited to use any element of own-list.si for any purpose other than personal, non-commercial use. Restrictions on use of materials not subject to the Official Journal of the Republic of Slovenia, and it posted content." Therefore this site is not Open, not machine readable and no bulk downloadable.
The legal registry at http://pisrs.si is newer and most of the sites at the original url redirect there. However, it is mostly a usability enhancement.

There is no mention of the license applicable, so have marked it as NOT open.

The site contains up-to-date information on legislation but is not bulk or machine-readable (simple HTML). On open license terms and conditions at http://statutes.agc.gov.sg/aol/page.w3p;paId=AOL_PUBLIC_TERMS_CONDITIONS states "(5) Except as otherwise provided, the Contents of this Web Site shall not be reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted or otherwise distributed in any way, without the prior written permission of AGC."

Not openly licensed as license according to http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Content/Copyright#licensed) is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence Australia v3.0 (which is not open). Data is not machine-readable as data is either PDF or (poorly structured HTML) and is not bulk as you can only access on item at a time. Date available is date of new licensing.

Both Legislative Chambers, Diputados (http://www.diputados.gob.mx) and the Senate (http://www.senado.gob.mx) don't have machine readable and bulk data. Nonetheless, outside websites have built APIs and other scrapping-based information flows in order to gather and publish information in sites such as www.curul501.org and apps such as https://itunes.apple.com/mx/app/id625548107?mt=8. Other internal data standards, such as law taxonomy are either not public or don't exist. No license could be found which makes the data not open.

SPANISH CONSTITUTION 1978 http://www.congreso.es/portal/page/portal/Congreso/Congreso/Hist_Normas/Norm/const_espa_texto_ingles_0.pdf SENATE approved from 2012 to 2013: http://www.senado.es/web/resultadobuscador/index.html?searchId=1 pending http://www.senado.es/web/actividadparlamentaria/actualidad/leyes/entramitacion/index.html CONGRESS approved http://www.congreso.es/portal/page/portal/Congreso/Congreso/Iniciativas/LeyesAprob?selectLey=tituloListadoTodasLeyes

The Saudi Embassy page includes 5 links to legislation. The King is also advised by a legislative body called the Consultative Council (Majlis Al-Shura). The Council proposes new laws and amends existing ones. It consists of 150 members who are appointed by the King for four-year terms that can be renewed. Because Saudi Arabia is an Islamic state, its judicial system is based on Islamic law (Shari’ah). The King is at the top of the legal system. He acts as the final court of appeal and can issue pardons. There are also courts in the Kingdom. The largest are the Shari’ah Courts, which hear most cases in the Saudi legal system.

Brief Description: All Russian laws and other official documents that came from government ministries, agencies and federal services published using a few government websites. Base website is http://pravo.gov.ru - this project is being maintained by Federal Security Service (FSS) and this website is keystone for Russian laws disclosure. A few serious issues exists with Russian laws: 1. No machine readable data 2. No bulk download 3. No open licenses for laws 4. Government websites not integrated with pravo.gov.ru instead they provide links to the commercial providers of laws information like Russian companies "Consultant" (http://consultant.ru) and "Garant" (http://www.garant.ru). 5. Laws published on many of government websites available as "high quality scanned images". Step by step explanation 1. Does the data exist? Yes, at http://pravo.gov.ru 2. Is data in digital form? Yes, data available via website pravo.gov.ru 3. Publicly available? Yes, this data is publicly available. We don't need FOI request to get it. 4. Is the data available for free? Yes, this data is available for free. No payment is required. 5. Is the data available online? Yes. Data available at http://pass.rzd.ru 6. Is the data machine readable? No, it's only HTML pages. 7. Available in bulk? No, data is not available for bulk download 8. Openly licensed? No, this data is public domain data but no open license available. 9. Is the data provided on a timely and up to date basis? Yes, this information updated frequently, on daily basis. Special comment from Ivan Pavlov: we consider the Russian legislation as open licensed, taking into the account Russian Legislation provisions. Russia has no special license for government data and we should consider the legal regime of data use and dissemination form "the common rule" point of view. According to the Civil Сode of Russia (Article 1259), official government documents including laws, other legal texts, judicial decisions, other materials of legislative, administrative and judicial character are not objects of copyright. According to the Russian FOI law (Article 4), one of the main FOI principles in Russia is the freedom to seek, receive, transmit and disseminate information on activities of government bodies and bodies of local self-government in any legal way. Also according to the Russian FOI law (Article 1), information about the activities of government bodies and bodies of local self-government is information (including documentation), established within government bodies, their territorial bodies, local authorities or institutions subordinate to the state authorities, local self-government (hereinafter - organizations subordinated to it), or received by the mentioned bodies and organizations. Information on the activities of government bodies and bodies of local self-government also includes laws and other normative legal acts concerning information on the activities of bodies of local self-government – municipal legal acts defining structure, competence, formation and operating procedures of the above-specified bodies and organizations, and other information concerning their activity. Thus, according to the current Russian legislation, there are no legal restrictions on use, reuse or redistribute legislation data.

Only a small part is available in digital format.

The legislation is available, however, mostly in .doc format

Unstructured text data for now. Plans to release linked open data has been around for years but not turned into practice.

They don't collate later amendments, or changes through notices, in any way. This means that if you need to see the "real" most recent draft (including all amendments and updates by Regulation), you need to subscribe to a private legislation provider which is prohibitively expensive, even for practitioners. A new private service lawsofsouthafrica.up.ac.za makes many of the consolidated laws available for free in PDF form.

• Name: Korean laws and policy
• Coverage: Present and past laws and regulations of the Republic of Korea

The data is not systematically available, and also the whole database of legislation and changes in legislation since the inauguration of the State of Israel does not exist in an open license.

Seems no restriction for its use but not clear, but unified big data seems not available (you have to download them one by one). English translation of those laws are also available (http://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/) but not always up-to-date.

no mention of licensing, can't see option for bulk download nor of the data in anything apart from PDF or viewable on website (so, not machine readable)

We cannot find reference to a licence therefore we have responded with unsure. In addition, there is a disclaimer on the site regarding the accuracy and completeness of these data as see here - http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/disclaimer.html.

Data is available on the Tunisian Official Gazette website. Also, since 2012, recent laws projects are published in the parliament official website: http://www.anc.tn/site/main/AR/docs/projets/liste_projets.jsp On this website (Arabic-only, French broken), documents are available in PDF formats.

Data is licensed as follows: "All rights reserved, Egyptian Government Services Portal". Not sure all laws are available in English.

Ministry of Law, Justice, Constituent Assembly & Parliamentary Affairs is responsive to these data

Not all information is available Not all information available is in a readable format (there are a lot of PDF documents)

Structure of laws / law books could be improved: most legislation is available in HTML, but it misses semantic markup. Jurisprudence can be searched / viewed in a flash-based application.

Subscription to Registro Oficial currently costs USD 280 per year for the digital version and USD 504 for the printed version. It includes all laws, statutes and regulations since 2009. Many laws are available online for free, but only Registro Oficial includes all published and valid laws, regulations from every government office.

Editor: For private use, the data is available free of charge. However, commercial use requires a angreement ( read: subscription ) http://www.lovdata.no/info/lovavtale.html

All legislation is published by the Monitorul Oficial, the official gazette. The contents are available for on-line for free for a period of 10 days after publication. Afterwards, the information is available at request, off-line, and for a fee.

Only found the constitution of the Republic of Cyprus in .doc format (http://www.law.gov.cy/Law/lawoffice.nsf/All/D258BC27BC074E14C22575CB004421DD?OpenDocument). Other than that, not found any laws on official websites (unofficial: http://www.leginetcy.com/about_en.php)