The meeting participants included, in addition to EU staff, some 40 individuals from both old and adjoining EU Member States involved in the transposition of Directive 2003/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council ("The PSI Directive"), as well as René Hoenson (ECOMET), Harry Otten (Meteo Consult), Daniel Soderman (PRIMET) and Peter Weiss (NOAA) as invited speakers from the meteorological sector.

The draft agenda of the meeting is attached, whilst the Directive can be downloaded from
http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/pri/en/oj/dat/2003/l_345/l_34520031231en00900096.pdf

The presentations during the morning session on the implementation of the PSI Directive indicated that the transposition was progressing reasonable well in the various countries.

During the afternoon session the following presentations were made:

1.	Peter Weiss (NOAA):	Policies on the re-use of PSI in the US
2.	René Hoenson (ECOMET):	The view of the public sector
3.	Daniel Soderman (PRIMET):	The European experience
4.	Harry Otten (Meteo Consult):	The market view

The presentation by Peter Weiss included an overwhelming amount of background facts and case studies highlighting the futility of charging for basic data, whilst Daniel Soderman stressed in particular the impossibility of a "level playing field" as required by the EC Comfort Letter on ECOMET because of the enormous size of the operational data base, with special reference to ECMWF data. René Hoenson's 40-minute talk on ECOMET highlighted how different the public and private sector perspectives are, whilst Harry Otten discussed, in particular, dubious ECOMET practices.

The Power Point presentations by Peter Weiss, Daniel Soderman and Harry Otten are being included in the PRIMET website www.primet.org under "News and Events" and (in the longer term) "Documents".

During the final discussion Yvo Volman from the Commission made the following valuable legal points:

- In my interventions I first stressed the importance of article 10.2 of the Directive, a provision against cross-subsidies. The commercial branch of a public sector body cannot get the information at more advantageous conditions than commercial players.

- In reply to Peter Weiss' comments (echoing remarks from some of the meteorological institutes) I clarified the expected changes due to articles 6 (charges) and article 8 (licences). 

- The principles governing charging (article 6) leave a large margin of manoeuvre for public sector bodies, but will have two effects: they will increase the accountability (if charges are high they will have to be justified) and they allow to tackle cases where there is an abuse of dominant position, resulting in overcharging.

- The article on licenses (article 8) allows public sector bodies to impose conditions in a license (e.g. source reference). However, it also explicitly states that conditions shall not unnecessarily restrict possibilities for re-use and shall not be used to restrict competition. Public sector bodies can for example not prohibit private companies to add value to the information.

Public Sector Information Group
5^th Meeting with Member States Representatives
Friday, 23 April 2004, 10.00 – 16:30 hrs.

Euroconference Room
Bâtiment Euroforum
10, rue R. Stumper, Gasperich, Luxembourg

DRAFT AGENDA

1.	Welcome and introduction by chairman
2.	Update by Member States on the state of play on the transposition
3.	Ways and means of implementing the PSI directive: a) Means of readers b) Assets Lists
4.	Benchmarking and review: PSI study