Slashdot Mirror
Timetable App Developer Gets Nastygram From Transit Sydney
mikesd81 writes "ZDNet Australia writes that NSW state corporation RailCorp has threatened a Sydney software developer with legal action if he fails to withdraw a train timetable application that is currently the second-most-popular application in its category in Apple's App Store. Alvin Singh created Transit Sydney after he began teaching himself how to program in Cocoa Mobile. Within days of its Feb 18 release, Singh received a cease and desist notice from Rail Corporation NSW, the government body that administers Sydney's CityRail network. The email states: 'I advise that copyright in all CityRail timetables is owned by RailCorp. ... Any use of these timetables in a manner which breaches copyright by a third party can only occur through the grant of a suitable licence by RailCorp.'"
"As a government body, RailCorp information is protected by Crown copyright, a contentious provision in copyright law that has recently been used to block attempts to access information on the location of Victoria's bushfires and even seemingly innocuous information as the locations of public toilets. 'RailCorp's primary concern here is that our customers receive accurate, up-to-date timetable information,' RailCorp spokesperson Paul Rea explained. 'This includes details of service interruptions, special event services, track work and other changes. ... At this stage, it is not possible for RailCorp to grant third-party developers access to our internal passenger information systems. As such, any third-party CityRail timetable application would contain inaccuracies and have the potential to mislead our customers.'"
As far as I'm aware, Japanese trains have to be within ~2 minutes of the schedule or the passengers get a partial refund.
*runs*
Unfortunately the relevant part of Australian intellectual property law is a bit of a relic from the 'olden days' and actually doesn't bother to distinguish between a creative work, and merely publishing a fact. So things like telephone directory data and train timetables CAN in fact be considered copyrighted here.
Yes it's utterly ridiculous. The Australian Law Reform Commission is looking at this as a matter of priority in its review of Australian IP law, and it's likely to get changed within the next 5-10 years. But for now, that's the state of affairs.
Disclaimer: IAAL.
You may wish to compare copyright schemes - In particular, the EU & AU recognise the so-called "sweat of the brow" right extant in databases, which a timetable would qualify under. Times of football matches also seem to qualify.
The controlling law in Australia is Desktop Marketing Systems Pty Ltd [âoeDtMSâ] v Telstra Corporation Limited [2002] FCAFC 112. At paras 253 & 254:
253 It was not their alphabetical arrangement or their designation as headings that attracted copyright protection to the compilation of headings constituting the Headings Books. Rather, it was the labour of building up the collection (of headings). Desktop appropriated the benefit of all or most of that labour.
254 Accordingly, by parity of reasoning with my reasons for concluding above that Desktop reproduced a substantial part of the White Pages Directories and a substantial part of the Yellow Pages Directories, it also reproduced a substantial part of the Headings Books, and so infringed Telstra's copyright in those Books.
So, under Australian law, you can copyright a compilation of facts.
Cheers,
Michael
Well I'm qualified as one ... but I don't currently practice law. I'm a university lecturer ... specifically, Information Technology Law and IP Law. So saying 'IAAL' is slightly naughty of me since I'm not actually representing clients et al. at this point, I just have the necessary qualifications.
It also depends on how the information is retrieved.
For example, some 15 years ago in The Netherlands a company wanted to release a phone book to compete with the monopoly fixed line provider's phone book. This to sell advertisements and so of course. Now to get the telephone numbers, they took the phone book to China, and hired a bunch of Chinese for cheap to manually copy the numbers from paper into a computer, and then printed it. The monopolist of course didn't believe that, and a law suit followed.
The point was: reading and typing the numbers is legal, as the information could not be copyrighted. However directly copying the phone book (e.g. by using a photocopier) would be illegal.
This of course is not Australian law, but I just want to point out that even though the information (telephone numbers, sports results, TV schedules, transport time tables) may not be copyrighted, a certain representation of it may suddenly be copyrighted.
The train company may argue that it is illegal to draw the information from their web site (e.g. screen scraping), even though it is not legal for someone to walk down to the station, look at the published tables, type the information into their PDA, and publish is.
As another poster in this thread points out there is also an issue with TV listings: these are normally drawn directly from a TV channel's Internet site, and that may cause copyright problems. However if someone would gather the information from public sources (printed listings, the newspaper, whatever) then it may be a different matter.
Of course I think it is silly to have these tables copyrighted, and even silly from the train company to prevent this information to be known by as many people as possible (the more people know about when a train runs, the more are likely to actually take it), without knowing the details of how this information is retrieved and how the Australian copyright laws deal with this kind of information we can not say whether they are legally right or not. And whether they are morally right or not, that is a totally different discussion.
The headline says he got a nastygram from "Transit Sydney".
According to the summary that is, you know, right below it, "Transit Sydney" is the application, not the company. The company is "RailCorp".
Getting a nastygram from an application you developed does occasionally occur (fuck those runtime exceptions), but not in the sense this article implies.
I've recently finished a major contract in Zurich, and spent absolutely ages waiting for delayed trains in and around the city. Long enough to work out that the seconds hand on Zurich station clocks click on one second in slightly less than a second, completing a revolution in 59 seconds and then waiting for an extra second at the top. You can imagine how long I spent waiting around to get that bored.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
His Twitter page says "I've asked Minister Campbell to speak to RailCorp. They will meet with the app developers to negotiate how to use the info accurately"
As far as I'm aware, Japanese trains have to be within ~2 minutes of the schedule or the passengers get a partial refund.
Sadly, the same is not true in Sydney, where a few years back Railcorp defined "on time" to be anything up to five minutes after the scheduled arrival/departure time.
Naturally, this dramatically improved their "on time" performance statistics, which they then used to justify a fare increase.
With that said, from a technical perspective, their poor performance is apparently due to incompetence, not malice (at least according to my wife, who used to work for an engineering firm with a lot of Railcorp projects).