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WV Assessor Sues to Keep Tax Maps Off the Internet
An anonymous reader writes "After trying to charge $167,488 for their collection of county tax maps (in TIF format), West Virginia was forced by a judge to hand them over for a $20 'reproduction costs' fee. Now a county tax assessor has filed a lawsuit trying to block the tax maps from being put online, claiming copyright infringement and financial damages since fewer people are coming to her to buy paper copies at $8 per page."
That's exactly what I thought.
A quick Google search confirmed that many municipalities do consider them public record (whether they are or not); Sacramento, CA's site is very helpful (I picked one at random), but also protects identifying data like parcel ownership.
29B-1-3. Inspection and copying. ..
(1) Every person has a right to inspect or copy any public record of a public body in this state, except as otherwise expressly provided by section four of this article.
(3) The custodian of any public records, unless otherwise expressly provided by statute, shall furnish proper and reasonable opportunities for inspection and examination of the records in his or her office and reasonable facilities for making memoranda or abstracts therefrom, during the usual business hours, to all persons having occasion to make examination of them. The custodian of the records may make reasonable rules and regulations necessary for the protection of the records and to prevent interference with the regular discharge of his or her duties. If the records requested exist in magnetic, electronic or computer form, the custodian of the records shall make such copies available on magnetic or electronic media, if so requested.
http://www.legis.state.wv.us/WVCODE/29B/masterfrmFrm.htm
I don't believe the assessor can reasonably claim financial damage... generally copying fees are limited to nominal processing costs, or a close approximation thereof, and only in a few cases around the country have I ever heard of a government treating copying fees as a profit center... and those were only for specialized documents such as police reports being furnished to an insurance company.
This is such a backwards way of thinking. I work for a software company that is involved in document management, and everywhere we look, cities, counties, and states are looking to pass the savings on to their citizens, not trying to nickel and dime their way into mediocrity. The tax assessor's office's budget can always be fixed if they truly are relying on those $20 fees. Even those organizations that do make some money off supplying documents are constantly trying to improve access and let people access documents online and so on.
I'm the IT critter for a town in Mass and I manage the online stuff, including mapping. It's possible that the sales of copies are built into the decision about whether or not to update maps, do additional flyovers, and that sort of thing. I don't know about taxes in WV, but here in Mass local government is very very lean, and I can easily see someone in a similar fiscal dilemma deciding that the best way to pay for more frequent updating of mapping (which with flyovers and such is fairly pricey for a small town or county) is by generating revenue from the maps. Particularly as most of the users of mapping are businesses--this doesn't apply quite as much to tax maps, but our GIS layers are pretty expensive to produce and when 90% of your requests for GIS maps are from business who would otherwise need to do the survey work themselves, it's a fine line between public access and corporate welfare.
Also, having possibly out of date maps available in a central archive does kind of worry me. I'd rather have people getting them from us directly. Citizens have a habit of getting the wrong end of a stick on something and storming into town hall irate out of their minds over problems that don't really exist. I've had irate people in my office banging on the counter and screaming waving printouts of some web site somewhere they found that they thought was our official one. Part of managing a municipal website is trying to figure out ways in which information can be presented where citizens will not be confused and assume the worst and where it will be kept accurate and fresh.
Having said that, I agree with most of the people here. These are public records. All our GIS layers are on our website in addition to the ones that are on MassGIS, which includes a viewer. We're adding PDF'd tax maps as of our next update. Our property record cards are available online. I think and our town thinks these are records that should made as widely available as possible. But IMHO that's not the only legitimate way to look at things.
As has been pointed out many times before on Slashdot, copyright can only protect creative expressions, not ideas. To the extent that a copyright of a particular expression would be tantamount to copyrighting the idea, then one cannot legitimately claim copyright over the expression. If the expression is primarily functional in nature and if the only reasonable alternative representations of the idea are preposterous trivial modifications (e.g., change the colors of the map, make the lines dotted rather than solid, etc.), then that is a strong indication that the expression is substantially equivalent to the idea itself and is not candidate for copyright protection under U.S. law.
(Disclaimer: IANAL, but I did take a graduate law course on IP about a year ago. This post is not intended to be legal advice. Consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction for legal advice before you take any actions based on the conjectures contained in this post. Have a nice day.)
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
Disclaimer: I live in WV and more importantly, in Kanawha County where this is happening. More, I do GIS for a living so I'm biased to the max in this...
All the tax assessors in WV have been doing a very poor job at property assessments and for years have buried it in poor paper maps. I have been to municipalities that haven't updated their tax maps in decades. I've also seen the quality of these maps and believe me, until recently they were very sketchy at best. We have had the difference between tax ticket method of determining Fair Market Value with a multiplier of 4.0 and appraised value of over double. In a properly assessed county by contrast, a 1.67 multiplier yields the appraised value. What that means is that Kanawha County is losing out on a huge amount of taxes all because the assessor's office is corrupt as all get out. This causes politicians to panic as they see dwindling taxes and before you know it those that are paying a fair share are having their property taxes increased all because the assessor isn't doing their jobs properly.
More broadly, municipalities have relied on the fees charged for paper copies of public documents so much that they feel threatened by electronic distribution. In this case it is the assessor's office but I have seen this in other areas such as deeds, birth / death certification, building permits, etc. They are seeing it as a revenue stream instead of something the public already paid for. This thinking needs to be defeated as well as those that oppose full and free disclosure.
I agree with you that all the information in a tax assessment of real property should be public record if for no other reason than the fact that the public has already paid for that information.
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