Company Register 35% open

While reviewing this submission, I have taken into consideration remarks made by Augusto Herrmann on the Open Knowledge forum. Indeed, while the submitter seems to have been very thoughtful in their response, and has actually found all major official sources of company data in Brazil, each of the different official sources have quite different characteristics. More specifically: Receita Federal do Brasil Access to company data in Brazil - on a federal level - is very limited. In order to access data, one needs to know the identification number (CNPJ) of the company. There is no service where people can search for the identification number if they only know the name. This is the official registry for taxation purposes, and the most reliable national registry of companies in Brazil. As the submitter mentioned, the query on their website only allows you to fetch information in one company at a time and you have to fill a Captcha to get it. Results are given in .HTML format and include Registration Number, Opening date, Business name, Title of establishment, Code and Description of the main economic activity, Code and Description of the secondary economic activities, Code and Description of the legal status, Public place, number, zip code, district, county, e-mail, phone, and registration status. Data cannot be downloaded in bulk and website's data update frequency is not known. One might argue that all company data is in the public domain in Brazil since according to Article 7, III of Law 9.610/1998 (Brazilian copyright law), databases are only copyrightable if their creation has involved a creative step ("criação intelectual"). A registry of companies is just a collection of factual information, so it is in fact not copyrightable. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística - IBGE https://brasilemsintese.ibge.gov.br/servicos/numero-de-empresas-por-segmento-de-servico.html https://www.sidra.ibge.gov.br/bda/pesquisas/cempre/ Brasil em síntese and the SIDRA system have aggregate data. While this may be useful for some purposes, aggregate data probably don't qualify for the company registry of the GODI, as it should have data on each individual company. Also, the data is offered as tables in a webpage, and there appears to be no download option. Ministério do Planejamento, Desenvolvimento e Gestão https://compras.dados.gov.br/fornecedores/v1/fornecedores.html https://dados.gov.br/dataset/compras-publicas-do-governo-federal There is an API call (and corresponding entry on the open data portal), on government suppliers, within the open data API for government procurement, acquisition and contracts. However, this is incomplete, as it only contains data on companies that have ever supplied goods or services to government, or those who have ever registered as a requirement for any businesses to be allowed to apply for a bid in public tenders. As an incomplete register of companies, this has not been considered to qualify for this dataset in previous editions of the Index. Ministério da Transparência, Fiscalização e Controladoria-Geral da União https://transparencia.gov.br/ Portal da Transparência also offers downloads for the same data of the registry of supplier companies. This is also incomplete and hasn't been considered to qualify in past editions of the Index. Juntas comerciais There is one of these in each of the 26 Brazilian states and federal district. They are the official registry of companies de jure, i.e. when you want to register a new company you go there. Some of them have a query form online that allows for some kind of search in company names, e.g. the one in the State of São Paulo. In the São Paulo example, the information available on each company is quite detailed, but you can only get one at a time and there is no kind of bulk download available. Some states require a login in order to search, e.g. states of Minas Gerais and Paraná. Others require you to fill an inquiry form and wait for a response from some public official, e.g. the state of Mato Grosso. Still others (e.g. Paraíba) offers to send you a listing of all companies registered in the state for a fee. Finally, some (e.g. Amapá) do not appear to even offer some basic kind of name discovery service, at least not that can be used by internet. In conclusion, it seems that the only way of accessing company data is via the Receita Federal do Brasil website but again, these are behind a search mask so one needs to know an entity's unique identifier in order to find it.