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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."
I thought in the US these things were public record? Or am I wrong.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
It seems to me that she wouldn't be complaining if the $8 she charged for paper copies was only to cover distribution and reproduction costs. The fact that she tried to charge $8 per map for a digital copy makes it obvious that she's trying to turn an extra buck on what is, quite obviously, information that should be public and available for anyone interested.
Like the article says, taxation should be a transparent process. This isn't in any way similar to the argument over physical music costs vs. digital downloads; this is something where profits shouldn't be involved at all. And if they truly weren't, she would have no problem publishing them on the internet for free (or only a nominal cost to cover bandwidth and hosting, which really should be included in taxes since it's a public service available for all; 0.0025$ per resident per year should be more than enough to cover it).
Nemilar http://www.techthrob.com - Visit Me!
You've seen it, I've seen it - we all have: local-government's small fish. The things some of these people rationalize in their small ponds - especially when prompted emotion or greed - are just mind-boggling when viewed *from outside the situation*. This lady is a throwback that, sorry, needs to be thrown back into the general population and be replaced =/
"The government" is not represented by a single assessor in West Virginia. Perhaps you noticed that the judge [also a member of "the government"] required that they be handed over for a very small fee.
Why not free? I'll tell you why: if I were pissed off at a department in my town, I could just stroll in and request everything. Flood them with requests for information. It takes time to gather all of that information and fill the requests, and that takes away from the other duties those employees must attend. Placing a nominal fee serves to significantly reduce the action of those who seek simply to waste time, but doesn't serve as a substantial burden to those who want the information for productive purposes.
Finally, given that this is being settled in the judicial system, your call for angry mobs is more than a bit premature.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Normally, the copying should not be a profit operation. However, this copying is a big part of what such an office does. That requires some equipment investment. And these are not small 8.5x11 sheets that typical copying equipment can serve. I've been to one of these offices in a West Virginia county, before, and these are on the order of 3x2 feet in size for the original paper copy. To some extent, the concern may be to protect that investment in reproduction equipment that could go underutilized if the maps go online.
But the world is changing. I should be able to click on "tax map" on my GPS equipped phone and have it automatically pull up the map of where I am standing, and overlay that with a satellite/aerial photo view, with names and addresses from the phone book, etc. I should not have to make a trip down to the county tax assessor just so they can pay off an antiquated copy machine due to their inability to assess the pace of technology development.
These maps are not accurate in terms of exact positioning. The assessment information is official, but the land shape and position is merely for identification purposes, only. Ironically, however, this very technology could also help make such maps much more accurate. Integrated with standardized survey data and low level aerial photos, and the assessments can be much more accurate in terms of things like valuation.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I'll let you figure out how to do this, in the role of a county tax assessor.
Before automatic reproduction equipment came along, you could not even have a copy of the map unless you paid a map maker to hand create a copy. That would be half a day effort for just one sectional map. The cost: half a day's wages. Want the entire county? Several weeks wages.
Along comes photo copy machinery. But this isn't cheap because the maps are huge. Even in 2008 this means investing a huge sum of money for the specialized (and hence, no economy of scale which means very expensive) equipment needed to make the copies.
Now you are a tax assessor. You don't have the budget to just buy the equipment. So your office has to take out a loan to buy it, to be paid back through the sale of copies. This is in no way a profit operation, as all the money collected for copies goes to pay off the loan. Now consider that along comes the internet and suddenly no one wants your paper copies anymore. But you're stuck with a big piece of equipment no one else has any use for, and a loan that still needs to be paid off.
I'm sure part of that money, especially after the loan is paid off, ends up supplementing the office operation itself. But that's actually typical for a great many government operations, where the routine servicing needs of a very small segment of the population has to be paid for by those that use it. A tax assessor general operation probably should not qualify for this since the general operation affects all property owners and potential buyers and a few lawyers with property cases ongoing. But it is not that far out of line, as $8 for a copy of a large sheet at 3 feet by 2 feet and larger is close to the real cost considering things like the special equipment and handling needed.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The information in question is information that ordinary people need to have access to. These people have already paid their state taxes to fund the collection of this data, and they should be allowed to see and use it. You can't say that ordinary people can get it for free but corporations (which, technically, have many of the rights of individual people) have to pay.
Everyone here seems to be jumping on the state of West Virginia because they had the gall to go and create a work, with tax dollars and try to recoup some of that investment.
The key is with tax dollars - which means taxpayers already paid for the information and now are getting charged a second time for something they could 9and by WVA law should) make available electronically for free or nearly free.
Look at the company that is actually suing to get government records for free!
RTFA - it sued to only pay a reasonable copying cost, not what the state demanded. Winning that is a win for all taxpayers seeking public records. WVA wants to prevent them from making the data available in order to protect their revenue stream.
They are creating a system using publicly funded tax records, that is for profit, and even worse, ultimately going to be used to enable corporate spying on the American people. While you think the government should just hand over all of its digital data for $20, I think it is absurd that a well financed and well capitalized corporation cannot pay a few hundred thousand dollars for data that it is going to make millions on.
Because anyone else can get the same data for the same price; making money by adding value is no sin; it's a good thing.
We - the citizens - paid for that information through taxes, individual and corporate, and ought to have access to it to use as we see fit. If tax assessments were private records it would be a different story, but they aren't.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Raise their costs and they will pass it to the customer, plus tax and profits. Lower their costs and more companies will enter the market, with better services and lower prices.