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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.'"
Then, a Palm app was "sponsored" by some Palm user group, and the iPod download mysteriously disappeared from their website.
Now, the MBTA is +$6BN in debt and can't afford to do anything like this- or implement the real-time tracking system all the busses are equipped with. It gets worse- Charliecards can't have money or passes loaded on them via the web, nor can you check their balance via the web. The commuter rail system was supposed to switch over a while ago. Student passes? Not able to load them onto Charliecards. They're such fucking morons that when they came up with bike cages that were "secured via charliecard", they neglected to mention that you can't have an existing charliecard granted cage access- not only that, but the bike charliecard can't have anything loaded on it!
Please help metamoderate.
This seems one of the cases when an Idling corporation wans to get money out of work done by someone else.
The corporation did not have a product that people wanted, a person makes such product and now the corp wants the idea and the money I presume.
I have a feeling that laws should contain a part where the "intent" of the law is stated. In the Copyright law the intent is to give a limited monopoly on the "product" to allow people to produce new books that otherwise would not be viable.
A train timetable is no such thing, yes it is printed, but it is a byproduct of the service, not a product in itself !
IANAL The point is: If laws had a part where it was written what was the general aim of the law than maybe it would be simpler to decide on borderline cases.
Correct. They even give you a receipt to turn into your employer or school explaining that they are responsible for your tardiness.
I seem to recall reading the average delay last year was only 26 seconds.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
he should add 1 second to each time and suddenly it's not a fact from their timetable, it's his own creative work that merely HAPPENS to be close to theirs. no harm done.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
So create an app so that it collects real-time data gathering information via GPS, Wi-Fi hub, and cell tower triangulation and uploading it to a central server (similar to Google Latitude). You could even use the accelerometer in the iPhone to detect when trains started moving, since I'm sure that it would be a different profile than walking. After a month or so, you'd have a real database of when the trains run rather than what appears on the schedule, which is more valuable information anyway. They couldn't touch that info, since they don't own it. If I lived Down Under, I'd write it just to tell them where they can stuff their copyright.
Seriously. Links to PDFs are bad enough. I really didn't want iTunes to launch itself.
Never heard of anyone getting a refund.
They do give out the receipts though, which legally protect you from being tardy. Quite useful because when it rains, the train are guaranteed to be at least 5min late, sometimes up to 30min.
Other common reasons for trains being late are overcrowding and suicide.
Which is also holding back DIY PVR adoption since there is no legal source of TV show timetables.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I'd say Japan. I've been there a few times and have always been amazed as I watch long distance trains pulling into the station exactly when the timetable says they should.
http://www.themeparks.ie
Couldn't the developer create an application of what yesterday's, or the previous week's, train schedule was? Then, the application would be reporting past events, much like any news agency is allowed to do.
I think 5 years is far too short for "anything military", although in general if the government is relying on copyright law to restrict the dissemination of information, then it probably isn't sensitive enough to keep out of the public domain, even within five years.
I wonder if we'll ever know the whole truth about the warrantless domestic wiretap program? I'm not optimistic.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
A lot of this is because we have a small population and a LARGE body of old law inherited from English common law. In America, a far greater proportion of what was originally common law has been codified into statutes.
A smaller, less litigious population also means that fewer opportunities arise for courts to apply a modern eye to some of these laws. So I guess the 'refresh rate' of our laws is slower than in larger countries. The right case to challenge a stupid law needs to come before the courts before things will get changed, but that 'right case' might involve some pretty uncommon circumstances.
Also many of these 'stupid-sounding legal issues' as they are reported on Slashdot are sensationalised, or the summary misses a crucial point (or half the story!). This applies to any legal stories on Slashdot, not just ones originating from .AU.
Australian law by and large is well thought-out ... just sometimes a bit slow to get updated to deal with issues surrounding new technologies. Our IP law in particular is in need of an overhaul (although incidentally, it was made a lot worse by the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement signed a few years ago, which required us to adopt some DMCA-style provisions).
The Australian governmental system has its strong points - it's a lot less susceptible to vote-buying and big business influence than the US system. Partly that's because we don't directly elect a head of state resident or even the Prime Minister (which understandably in most Americans' opinion is a bad thing). So we don't have the need to spend huge amounts of money promoting candidates (look at the money spent by Obama/McCain on their campaigns last year ... I'd be surprised if our major parties spent 1% of that when we have elections).
It's not the most ridiculous thing in the world. Facts could be seen to be more deserving of copyright protection because, unlike creative works, they have to be collected and, depending on the context, kept up-to-date. This takes time and money. I'd be pretty pissed off if I collected large amounts of information, putting substantial resources into making sure it was accurate and up-to-date, with the intention of recovering that investment through advertising (for example) only to have someone reproduce it sans-advertising for free.
Obviously there has to be a distinction between the fact and the collected data, and it probably shouldn't apply to data that already exists, but a knee-jerk reaction against copyright might not be helpful.
A few years ago (~2004-5) there were severe problems but after the government leaned heavily on the train companies management things are running fine with better than 87% of trains less than 5 minutes late.
Considering the Dutch railway system is the most densely used in the world this is remarkable.
Anyway, later this year on the busiest lines trains will start running at fixed 6-10 minutes intervals without a time table, the next one is on it's way!
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
For an interesting homework assignment, now compare the suicide rates of those countries.
Them:
Me:
Them:
Me:
Them:
***Quite useful because when it rains, the train are guaranteed to be at least 5min late, sometimes up to 30min.***
No kidding. And you might mention that Tokyo gets around 150cm (60 inches) of rain a year. That's as compared to 40 inches in Seattle and 29 in London.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
You sir are a genius. I was going to suggest some kind of random number generator based on some non-copyrighted number sequence (may be, something like the Fibonacci sequence), but your idea is much better -- it's even CSI worthy.
That being said, I think a wiki, or better yet just a couple of handwritten notes of actual times from his user base would actually be enough, at least for now. In the meantime, I'd just post a copy of the letter on the web app, plus I'd post the contact information of all the lawyers, plus all the names and all the phone numbers of the employees/officials with any say on this matter.
If worse comes to worse, he could just use his app, Transit Sidney, as a web app with absolutely no time tables, but just complaints about delays. Such a service would be just as valuable, in my opinion.
There was a case recently where a well-dressed guy with a laptop case passed out on the Red Line. The passengers hit the emergency button, the mid-train conductor came out, took one look at him, said "he's fine, just drunk."
The train went another half a dozen stops, including past Mass General Hospital (literally. The stop is maybe 500 feet from the emergency room), and Park Street, where Boston EMS had been told to meet the train. The train didn't stop at Park- it went all the way to South Station, miles from any hospital.
To put this in context- they had just announced they had put defibrilators in all of the commuter line trains after a guy died because (drumroll please) the conductors refused to stop the train to meet an ambulance crew- they went all the way from Wellesley to South Station, by which time the guy was a vegetable. They got their asses sued, and lost- there should have been manslaughter charges.
Please help metamoderate.
That's better than in Boston. An MBTA bus is not late until two hours past its scheduled arrival time. I found this out a couple years back. In January. I'm sure you can imagine my displeasure.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
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.
They tried this in the UK. It still wasn't enough to keep them on their "targets" for timekeeping, so the current strategy is that if a train is more than 10 minutes late they cancel it and hold it back so it can be "on time" for the next slot in the schedule.
End result was that instead of having trains gradually get later over the course of the day, 2 or 3 get cancelled and passengers have to wait 30 minutes instead of 10. But the "on time" statistics look better...
The US murder rate is about 5.9 per 100,000. It hasn't been at 9 per 100,000 in a number of years. The UK's is about 1.4 per 100,000.
The US counts a murder when there's a body and foul play is suspected. The UK counts a murder when there's a conviction.
Japan's is about 0.5 per 100,000.
When a father of five kills his kids, wife, and himself, Japan counts seven suicides, the US counts six murders and a suicide. (Try comparing the sum of the murder and suicide rates in both countries to see whether it's mathematically possible that the US has a lower rate if they were counted the same.)
The murder victimization rate of US citizens of UK descent is lower than that of UK citizens. Ditto for US citizens of African descent vs. Africans, US citizens of Japanese descent vs. Japanese citizens, and for several other regions of origin. (Allowing immigration of people from more violent cultures and letting them keep their cultures until they voluntarily adopt another has the downside of raising the average level of violence - though fortunately {for others} the violence occurs mainly among the groups in question rather than across group boundaries.)
When comparing death rates from murder and drawing conclusions about culture, don't forget to include deaths from war and genocide (including euphemisms like "sectarian violence" and "ethnic cleansing").
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
1999 suicide rates per WHO:
(per 100,000)
JAPAN...M: 36.5 F: 14.1
US..........M: 17.6 F: 4.1
UK.........M: 11.8 F: 3.3
My take on these stats: honor is not taken lightly in Japan, and females just want attention, not the sweet release of death.
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
When a father of five kills his kids, wife, and himself, Japan counts seven suicides, the US counts six murders and a suicide. (Try comparing the sum of the murder and suicide rates in both countries to see whether it's mathematically possible that the US has a lower rate if they were counted the same.)
Citation?