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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."
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.
Look at the company that is actually suing to get government records for free!
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.
You are all right, this is an outrage. It is an outrage that a corporation can completely steal from the state in the name of commerce.
What we're looking at here is the looting of America, and unless you think that your job being sent over to India is a good side effect of trickle-down-economics, we need to rethink who is better, the investor, or the inventor, the shareholder, or the citizen. I for one am sick of our race to the bottom economic system let's-gut-america so that a bunch of people can take that money and lobby congress to do it -even more-.
When is this shit going to end!
If all of these people that we trade with around the world were so good as to be able to even remotely tolerate the massive disruption to American jobs that free trade brings, I would think they would be with the United States in Iraq. But they aren't, so screw them.
This is my sig.
Same business model as the RIAA. Same response too.