Slashdot Mirror
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."
lawsuits is the third.
--
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!
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.
put contextual ads on those maps.
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 =/
Just wondering, am I the only one stupid enough to think it had to be about Volkswagen upon reading the title? I'm worried.. :-/
You just got troll'd!
I am tired of this government that the U.S. continues to perpetuate. If these dipshits are unwilling to satisfy public will, they ought to be stripped of all responsibilities and held up in the public eye as examples of FAILED public service.
The public is what gives them power, and if they seek not to comply reasonably, they ought to be stripped of that power one magnitude greater than their infraction, to remind them who is putting them in charge.
This is not a business or a company. These people are there at our whim. When they fail to provide us with what they want, they ought to be ran out of office, and sent back to public life with the fury of thousands of people accompanying them.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
Given the funky West virginia law, I would keep my server and business centers out of WV and ignore everything else. As for the quality of the WV tax assessor's argument, it reminds me of this little incorporated town that consisted of 4 miles of empty interstate only, a speed trap, and a post office box in another town... don't bother to pay, the state ignores them, too.
"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
Death, taxes, and lawsuits. So long as they come in that order, I don't mind.
Governments can claim copyright? How? There are so many argument against it, I am not even sure where to start.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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
She just wasn't thinking big enough. She should have tried to claim copyright on the whole globe. Just think how much money should make on those royalties. That's more money than a fellar could make collecting aluminum cans his whole life.
And that, kids, is why cousins shouldn't get married.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
Don't you mean fireherass? Oh wait, this is Slashdot, you didn't rtfa.
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.
Or she still has that monster size paper copy machine that still needs to be paid off (they are not cheap in the versions needed to handle the large maps involved).
I agree, in this day and age, we should have such maps for no more than the cost of digital reproduction when we get them in digital form. And we should be able to. But just keep in mind why these tax assessors, and other government office officials in other circumstances like this, might be trying to collect the same money for digital data as for paper data ... they are stuck with continuing to pay off the loan for that equipment.
I hope the court rules against her since we need to move forward instead of being stuck in the past. But these government offices do have (incorrectly anticipated) future costs to resolve (how to pay off a giant photo copy machine when no one wants or can even use paper anymore).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
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
The 8 dollars per copy goes to the tax assessor not the county or the state.
She is filing suit be she wants the money...
So you consider a public official selling public records for a profit a hero?
Lets let all public officials in on this plan, I wonder what the president has for sale...
I wonder if WV will get back at those who pay $2000 fines in pennies by giving this guy the "collection of county tax maps (in TIF format)" in little 3.5" floppy chunks?
I can say for a state run by a bunch of Democrats the politicians tow a fine line between alienating a population whose "property rights" is right up there w/ "gun rights". A few years back my property taxes in greenbrier county went up 2-fold and there was near anarchy. These accessors want to keep these records private and away from the land owners for a reason. They are deathly afraid of what property owners will see of inconsistent patterns of taxation - and breaks they give large land holders such as timber interests. Yeah.... this from a bunch of democrats.
She needs to go back to making babies with her cousin in WV.
Reminds me of this one from 2001: Veeck v. Southern Bldg. Code Congress Texas town has the writing of the building code outsourced. Local guy obtains a copy and posts on the Internet, only to get sued for copyright infringement.
...but it's to benefit the PUBLIC, not their servants.
When it was all paper, Calgary used to let you come look at your own street map (dollar figure on every house lot superimposed) for free. That, to most people's mind, satisfied the requirement that you have transparency about your own assessment and those most directly comparable to it.
If you wanted a whole neighbourhood map, though, that was some hundreds of dollars; and it scaled up to tens of thousands for 10 lbs. of paper that gave you the hundreds of thousands of homes for the whole city.
The argument was that this amount of data was of very little interest to the private citizen - and a valuable professional tool for any real-estate company. So since the public data cost the public a lot of money to gather, due diligence in exploiting that property of the municipality required extraction of a market price from those businessmen, we charged what that traffic would bear. No different than letting a community group use a city building for free to have a meeting about re-zoning, but charging 1,000 salesmen market price to use it for a business conference.
Alas, nobody could deny that putting it all on the Internet was a public service. I think the "business" of selling large amounts of it has also fallen off because the real-estate agents just use the web site heavily, looking up one street at a time around houses they are selling or thinking of buying. Again, the "greater good" ruled...it was nice to have a revenue stream of four bits or a buck per citizen selling a $20K sheaf of paper to a dozen-odd real estate companies every year, but allowing the resource on the Net so people didn't have to come down to City Hall to make an inquiry was overall a greater public good. If somebody suffered from the change, well, that happens with changes, even overall-good ones.
I rather doubt the assessor lady is the personal owner of the copyright - the copyright holder has decided to do something else with their property. It's not copyright violation, it's use of copyright to maximize public good. Sorry.
If the tax maps themselves are "official documents" and have the force of law, then they are in the public domain.
If they are merely "for your convenience" renderings of legal descriptions of tax boundaries, e.g. "The boundary of Fire Tax District 1 runs from Point A to Point B" then she may be able to claim copyright. Any other mapmaker is free to go back to the same legal descriptions and create their own maps.
A few years ago the Supreme Court said that if a city "incorporated by reference" a "book of standard codes" as its electrical code, the incorporated portion could be printed without paying royalties to the people who wrote the book.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Most people get sued maybe once in their whole life, but pay taxes every year. I think I know where your trouble with the lawsuits is coming from. You're supposed to pay the taxes, you know ...
Yeah, but at least the lawsuits are tax-deductible that way.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!