Popular legal databases such as Lexbase and Acta Publica may be forced to close after a ruling in the Supreme Court, which states that the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes precedence over Swedish constitutional law, which has made exceptions for media with publishing licenses from the EU's regulations.
Nils Funcke, an expert on the principle of public access, sees two possible loopholes in the legislation that legal databases can exploit to continue their operations.
The first is to produce journalistic material from the judgments, which are then offered to customers in a database.
A possibility is to let an AI service rewrite the judgments into articles instead. But if the personal data remains and the companies then allow others to access them, I'm skeptical about whether it will hold up legally, as it is an obvious circumvention of the Supreme Court's ruling, says Funcke.
The second is to let customers instead become co-owners of the legal databases, in order to circumvent the provision that judgments may not be provided to "paying customers" or the general public.
This means that you get access to the judgments, but you don't pay for them, it's still kept within the company.
The background to the case in the Supreme Court is that Siren appealed the decisions in Umeå District Court and the Court of Appeal for Upper Norrland, where judgments were handed over to the news agency with new and decisive reservations.
The reservations stated that the documents may only be used in "journalistic activities" and not shared with paying customers in a searchable database – which Siren, with the service Acta Publica, and several other popular legal databases such as Lexbase, Verifiera, and Infotorg, have done for a long time.
The decision meant a reinterpretation of what should take precedence: the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or Swedish constitutional law – which has made exceptions for media with publishing licenses from the EU's regulations.
The Supreme Court now largely confirms that the Court of Appeal's decision was correct: the total exemption that has applied to media has not been compatible with EU law.
