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.'"
I don't know anything about Australian copyright law, but under US law you cannot copyright a fact. A train timetable would certainly qualify. This might be one area where we get things right.
block [...] seemingly innocuous information as the locations of public toilets.
something you definitely need when you have transit problems.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It has been a very long time since I started training to be a lawyer (and stopped later on) but I believe that Australian copyright covers both "ideas" and "information". In this light I would think a fact is considered information. My recollection of the law is a little hazy, so anyone feel free to correct me, but I do recall having this very discussion in a lecture once.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Er ... the 'proposed' filter is only that. Proposed. Just an idea in some retarded luddite Senator's head. And just recently has pretty much been assured of dying a slow death in the Senate since the Liberals and all the minor parties are voting against it. 90% of the public is against it. So that saga is basically over and has resulted in no filter.*
And my internet is perfectly fast thank you (~20 Mbit, very low contention ratio, and no DPI or P2P throttling like seems to be common in some other places). (Yes I have a monthly download limit, but I never even get close to it even when doing a fair bit of P2P, and I can always pay another 10 bucks or whatever for a higher limit if I need to ... big deal).
There's a lot that sucks about Australia I'm sure. But you could say that of anywhere. And the 'filtering' is not one of those things since it, well, doesn't exist.
* Not to say that we should rest on our laurels though. The filter proposal is pretty much dead for now, but we need to make sure it stays that way.
And that was ferry timetables :)
FreeBSD bounties
I don't know anything about Australian copyright law, but under US law you cannot copyright a fact. A train timetable would certainly qualify. This might be one area where we get things right.
In Australia (and I think elsewhere) there is such a thing as a "database right". A rough example would be the phone book. It is a collection of facts: people's names and their phone numbers. However, there is a significant investment in collecting these facts, and so the particular *set of facts* (ie, the database) has an associated database right. So, unless the authors of the app independently collected their own data on when trains pass particular stations (eg, by sitting in every station with a watch -- unlikely), they presumably were using RailCorps' "database" (timetable).
Governments all over the world are asserting copyrights on information created with public funding, or even public domain information.
Particularly annoying is when museums and similar institutions assert copyright over images of works that should have fallen into the public domain by now, in direct contradiction of their mission of disseminating those works to the public.
Potentially, governments can also use copyright claims in order to restrict distribution of information that the government finds politically undesirable: statistics, investigative reporting, etc.
Generally, everything a government creates with tax payer money should be public domain.
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.
Australia has some screwed up copyright law.
Dont be so sure >.
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.
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
That would put anyone who took a picture of any display in any Sidney train depot that showed any time schedule - on the wrong side of the law as well...pffttt....
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....
Heh, even I have to admit that there's quite a few Australia-sourced stories on /. these days. Not that I mind it (I'm Australian), but it's noticable.
I think a fair quota for Australia should be 1 in 15 stories. Based purely on comparative population - Australia has 22 million people, US ~300 million, so around 15x as many.
Of course that doesn't leave room for all the other countries, so my theory needs a lot of work...
Seriously. Links to PDFs are bad enough. I really didn't want iTunes to launch itself.
IANAL
Clearly. A lawyer would have considered the fact that this is not in the US & US law doesn't apply.
My pics.
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
Wikipedia may not be 100% factual, but data rarely is 100% factual. Anyway, Wikipedia is represented as being a compendium of facts. Does this mean that Wikipedia is not actually copyrighted, and can be used without attribution?
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
and then sue them when they build something similar themselves
Every elementary school that teaches that fact must pay me royalties, if I want to let them teach it at all.
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.
across the other side of the country, Transperth timetables for bus, train and ferries are integrated into Google Maps Mobile. Just sayin'
This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.
This is business as usual in Australia: The Federal Government uses the old archaic copyright practiced by *GREAT BRITAIN* (emphasis is theirs, not mine) where the government holds copyright on everything, and charge like a bull:
* Australian Maps are copyrighted by the federal government's mapping agency AUSLIG.
* Real Estate Data is copyrighted by e.g. Department of Natural Resources. They in turn make exclusive deals to data companies who sling wads of cash their way in exchange for special access. If you a citizen want access you're forced to go through these resellers. The famously greedy Macquarie Bank owns one of these.
* Tide tables are copyright.
* Even Aeronatical data is copyright. The US Department of Defense used to distribute a worldwide database of Aeronautical data, but they had to stop because "Air Services" (a branch of the Australian Government) hated the idea of the public getting for free what they were trying to sell. Instead of doing a worldwide edition without the Australian data, the US Department of Defense simply ended public access.
* Anything and everything. From simple forms to photos taken by government (e.g. a nice photo of that billion dollar aircraft paid for by your taxes) are copyrighted by the government.
* Even *THE WEATHER* is copyright. Print the weather in your local paper or stick it on the website, and you'll get an earful from the Weather Bureau who insists you "purchase a product license".
In all cases the people who run these departments like to think of themselves a private businessmen, but they're not: their capital is provided by the taxpayer and they've got all the protection of being part of the government. They're a monopoly. They can charge what they want. Not like you can go to the government down the road instead. Pigs at the trough.
This is different from the US where under the constitution the US Government does not copyright what it produces, reasoning your taxes paid to collect the data, so why should you be forced to pay again.
In the Sydney case here is the worst part: Their railway system is known as being beyond terrible. Trains don't show up, break down, disappear, bypass stations, ticketing doesn't work, there's bugger all security. There's a real culture of sloth, laziness and corruption there. And here's a guy selling something to help commuters (and offered to give it to the railways department for free) and they threaten him instead.
As pointed out else where there is database copyright, where the compilation of facts can be copyrighted. E.g. street indexes, phone directories and email addresses published on websites.
IANAL
[citation ne...
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
maybe you could advertise now for an alternate transportation system?
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.
So the information that he is disseminating is both classified and wrong. Sounds like the classic Scientology defense to me. I'm no lawyer, but I have the hunch that one of those charges will have to be withdrawn before the other even has a chance.
I guess you've never seen any reports about Victorian police then.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Indeed, as you should have nearly as many stories about Mexico City as Australia.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
In australia it was:
-proposed more than a year ago
-went through trials
-is having large amounts of public scrutiny
-has not been passed as law yet
and
-will not pass due to public outcry and a shifting sentiment in the senate.
Compare this to the US, where you'd only find out 18 months after it was implemented, and anyone asking about it would have been jailed.
... because the trains certainly aren't.
Worth noting that the minister in charge of this stingy bunch of copyright-enforcing goons is easily found at david@campbell.minister.nsw.gov.au
Feel free to provide him valuable feedback.
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;
and point out how bone headed Railcorp is being, and request that he force them to backoff. His email address is david@campbell.minister.nsw.gov.au and his name is David Campbell. An email to Nathan Rees, the Premier of NSW, at thepremier@www.nsw.gov.au wouldn't go astray either. Rees is also on twitter, so you can also pester him there.
Or you could complain to the Minister for Transport", David Campbell. Alternatively find your electorate by doing an Electoral District search, then look at this list to see who your state member is.
For all those in the U.S. - NSW is one state in a big landmass. Not all State governments do this sort of stupidity. NSW is in terminal decline at the moment, it's only a few years till us poor New South Welshmen get to kick them out of government. Unfortunately, my member of parliament is Joe Tripodi. Oops, did I type that into Google? Silly me.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Change the data so that everything is listed as 3 seconds early. It's no longer the same time table.
It seems that they had a report advocating a relaxation of certain provisions in the Crown copyright act "to allow for more easy access to public interest information, but those changes have yet to be implemented".
So for the time being Railcorp can sue the pants of anyone who publishes any part of their railway timetables. And they will since they're planning to bring out an app that does the same thing that this app does. Probably within the next 5 years or so, so "no worries mate".
Not a theologian, and not a mod on Wikipedia.
Oh to live in a country where train times were facts - here in the UK, at least my part of the UK, catching a train means turning up at the station, crossing your fingers and waiting.
OTH the time table had to exist before it was released to the public. The additional cost of putting it on the web can't have amounted to much.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Equivalently, in Europe and the UK, such compilations can be protected by both database right and copyright in compilations/databases.
For database right to subsist, the qualifying factor is the level of investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting the contents of the database - but not in the creation of the data themselves. In the notable Fixtures Marketing cases, lists of sport fixtures did not attract database right, because the effort involved in the determination of the fixtures at first instance was not qualifying investment.
For copyright in a table or compilation to exists, there must be skill, labour or judgement by the author of the table in its compilation. A slavish listing of facts cannot attract copyright. For copyright in a database to subsist, the selection or arrangement of the contents of the database must be the author's own intellectual creation.
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).
Owing to paranoid customers that won't even let you read your own log files, our application has to send us emails so we can tell them what they are going wrong. The worry comes when we get ones saying "help I am trapped in a VMWare instance, please get me out of here".
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
"Their railway system is known as being beyond terrible. Trains don't show up, break down, disappear, bypass stations, ticketing doesn't work, there's bugger all security."
It appears you have more than a bit of British legacy..
Tell me, do you also have the wrong kind of snow? Just curious..
Insert
But this is codified law. The information is Crown Copyright. It's the same here in the United Kingdom where the Crown Copyright originates. The name is something of a giveaway, Crown Copyright means that the copyright is held by the Crown, which is the legally the state. Remember that parliament sits at the invitation of the Crown aka our (thats yours and mine) Queen.
As for you head of state, yours comes almost free, cause we get to pay for it back in old Blighty. You only have to pay if she decides to pay you a visit, which is not that often. Why anyone would want to get rid of such a free meal ticket always amazes me.
Who cares what the police did in the nineteenth century?
it existed because someone _created it_.
It didn't exist as a natural phenomenon.
Advanced users are users too!
The simple solution for this application to get its initial data is to, instead of getting it from the developer, is to spider it from the website itself and parse it.
Yes, if they change the format it will break until the application is fixed, but at least you have the data until then.
This is how I made my own rail-road table app on my webserver. Yes, for the CityRail lists.
bash$
....Please torrent/seed these timetables.
That'll show them.
It took a couple of students 2 days to write a new standards compliant front-end and put it on the net (spoorboekje.nl).BR> This ran on the same data base owned by the railway company and was therefore declared unlawful and after just 10 very successful days switched off again.
But the shamed website developer for the railways had to admit they didn't understand their job and the official site was fixed.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
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"
Judging by the high ratings enjoyed by the producers of Underbelly, lots of people.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
the interesting one is China. It is the only one in which more women then men. But yeah, Japan is pretty high.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Who needs "timetables"? I'd love to just pull up a map of where all the buses actually are at the moment. It's always guesswork for me as to whether I want to walk or wait at the stop- and always annoying when I decide to walk and a bus passes me when I've walked half-way...
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Them:
Me:
Them:
Me:
Them:
Sorry, RailCorp, facts aren't copyrightable. As long as the developer of Transit Sydney uses a presentation or layout that differs from that used by Rail Corporation, their claim is not valid.
IANAL.
Leaving aside the question of whether facts are copyrightable (another post suggests that when Crown copyright gets involved they are in at least some cases), the basic contention made by RailCorp in the portion of the article quoted in the summary is that the railroad timetables are *not* facts.
Additive identity, multiplicative cancellation, distributive multiplication over addition: pick any two (unless 1 = 0)
You can see melbourne time tables with no hassels.
But lets hope the financial crisis gets so bad, the govt tax receipts fall by 90%, so they have to sack 50% of all the loosers they have on payroll sucking our money there. Bloody communist freaks.
In reality too many Aussies pretend to try to do well and hit it rich or be successfull by any means and that means being a prick and greedy by screwing people (thanks to those USA Corp training seminars).
Just like any communist nation, there is a lot of useless crud working in the public service.
rm -f 90% of the rules.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Well Australia is a democracy, while the USA is a republic. This is a typical difference between the two: openness and accountability, especially when taking the US government of late as an example. Now if only the USA would accept democracy for themselves instead of just imposing it on the rest of the world...
Wait a second... "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."
What that's saying is that you're only violating their copyright if you get a license to do so.
Whoever wrote that letter needs to re-take Remedial Passive Voice.
I don't know what's worse, the fact that such ridiculous laws exist or the fact the goverment rigidly enforces it.
I mean, come on. Send the guy a letter actually means that they had meetings about this and actively pursue suing people who wish to state facts. Facts mind you the publication of which doesn't incure financial loss to the Australian government. Fictional lala (RIAA) land loss or real world monetary loss.
http://www.funkworks.com.au/transit-sydney/
Looking at the screenshots, it seems that they may have copied the maps. That may be their downfall.
but the presentation i say on a little picture of the app was clearly a simple representation with normal fonts, it clearly lacked any artistic talent and was merely a common form of tabulating data.
Yeah i have a website with a white background and black test, and a table with this color and this color, and now i am going to sue every web 1.0 web site in existence for copyright infringement.
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.
I think you need to look up the definition of democracy...
If you're too lazy to follow the link, here's the first two definitions:
1. government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
2. a state having such a form of government: The United States and Canada are democracies.
What I think you meant to say was Australia is a constitutional monarchy and the USA is a republic. Canada (where I live) is also a constitutional monarchy. The former British colonies mostly all share a Westminster style parliament, and the same royal head of state, Queen Elizabeth II. The US gave up that privilege (if you want to call it that) in 1776.
When your business model requires restrictions on the exchange of FACTS you need to find a new business model. Maybe next we should start allowing patents on math too. Oh wait, we have that already, it's called software.
Before we had the internet and (affordable) calculators, people used to buy books that had printed tables of logarithms, sine, and cosines to say 6-8 digits. Often the publishers would introduce small random errors into their tables to enable them to be copyrighted.
Of course back then, it was _still_ a silly thing to do. Often the type for those books were set by hand (imagine some poor slobs computing the proper values on paper or with a calculator into a list deliberatly trying to create some errors, then having some other poor slob typing them up in a typewriter, and then yet another person setting up a printing lines with blocks with digits on them and organizing them row by row for a printing press) and contained much bigger errors as some errors were missed by the people who cross-checked the tables. It was a giant game of "telephone" back in those days...
Gee, I miss my slide rule ;^)
And a solution presents itself!
UTF-8: There and Back Again
The US has had recent battles over this. The NBA tried to claim copyright over its basketball scores and legal publishers tried to claim copyright over digitized court opinions that they took great care to scan.
The railway schedule situation is probably on the stupid end of the fact/copyright spectrum, but serious issues get raised when people put tons of effort into amalgamating and organizing public factual data.
Sounds like that app developer is getting railroaded!
Chicago is doing that for their buses: http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/home.jsp
even with mobile applications (where you need the information the most).
Unless the US asks real nice.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
IAAAAIPL (I am also an Australian IP lawyer... yes, there are millions of us).
Although I agree that in general our IP laws need an overhaul, I strongly feel that the most 'ridiculous' parts are NOT the UK/common law derived ones, but rather the statutory ones imposed virtually unilaterally by our American friends. So I am slightly surprised that a lecturer in Australian IP law is so quick to condemn our system as flawed by implcit comparison to the US when the biggest problems within it are caused by TRIPS and the US-Australia FTA (that latter of which, IIRC, imposed some DMCA-style obligations on Australia in exchange for the honour of trading with the USA - whatever that's worth now).
You have also failed to mention that you cannot actually copyright a single fact - it is the compilation of facts into a particular form which is capable of attracting copyright. So if the timetable contained one piece of information, "Train X leaves at 10:00pm" then (assuming you didn't use the identical choice of words) that fact per se is not subject to copyright. But when you compile 10,000 of these into a table and publish that, it is subject to copyright.
Although this differs from the US system, one argument in favour of it is that there should be protection for the skill and labour exerted in the production of a compilation of facts, notwithstanding that there is no "creative" expression. This reflects the non-US origins of Australian copyright law.
Read Pynchon.
I've got some very bad news for you, despite your smugness about our wonderful system of government (I am Australian).
There is no law that needs to be passed. The law has been on the books since this Howard years. This is merely the passage of new regulations by the Minister, which is not something which must be agreed to by parliament.
So, ironically, you ARE finding out "18 months after it was implemented".
This is the problem with bad lawmaking - it's effects are not always apparent until much later, by which time god-knows-who might be in control of the executive arm of government.
Read Pynchon.
No, Australia is a constitutional monarchy while the USA is a republic.
They are both democracies in the ordinary sense of the word.
Read Pynchon.
Lol I got wooshed. First time!
Still clueless as to why, though.
Yah, and most of that seems to happen in June, with the rest happening when the typhoons blow through. Whee!
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
According to the wikipedia entry, Australia is a constitutional monarchy AND parliamentary democracy. A very common combination. The head of state (a foreign queen in case of OZ) has not much to say and is mostly a symbolic head of state; actual governing of the country is done by a democratically elected parliament.
My native Netherlands is also a constitutional monarchy, and a parliamentary democracy.
Looks like the powers that be have weighed in on this: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/03/09/1236447097082.html
Do they have nudist trains?
Rather than beating on the 'information good, copyright bad' dead equine again, let's look at the reasons a transit agency might want to control timetable information, and how a well-meaning information provider might actually make the situation worse.
I should know--I developed and distributed the first online timetables for Amtrak, back in the days when Gopher was state of the art.
The principle you've got to understand is that in this context, wrong information is _worse_ than no information. If timetables change, and the website or app distributing the unofficial timetables isn't updated promptly, some of the customers using those timetables are gonna miss the train. Rightly or wrongly, they blame the railroad.
So any online timetable project has to be a close collaboration between the railroad and the developer, and the developer has to be extremely reliable about pushing out updates whenever timetables change: not only the periodic changes, but unexpected ones as well.
So how do you make a project like this successful? Well the first step is asking permission and working out an update plan--not publishing the app.
In our case, we spoke to management people at Amtrak (and a number of commuter railroads) before launching our projects. We explained what we were doing, how the information would be distributed, who would benefit, who would be responsible for updates, and stressed that the project would only go forward with the permission of the system. Sometimes we got a quick OK, other times it had to go through channels and took months. A few systems told us "no" (in some cases they had their own projects in the works) and we respected their decisions. But because we were a well-established organization that understood the industry and the challenges of the project, most of the responses were positive.
We lined up a string of volunteers to transcribe information, created a standard format, and soon had our first package ready. Many people wanted to help redistribute the files, but we strongly discouraged that because we would have little control over updates and people would have no idea whose schedule site was correct. Eventually we took on three other partners, all of whom were considerably involved in publishing transportation information and knew the importance of removing outdated information immediately.
A few years later, Amtrak launched its own web site. Schedules were available, but the interface was awful and you could only get point to point schedules rather than the entire timetable for a particular train. We discussed the situation with our liaison at Amtrak, who initially wanted us to close our project; and after we pointed out the way the official site was failing to meet some customers' needs, they agreed we should continue. We did so, with the official and unofficial sites working in parallel for a coupla years, and then Amtrak upgraded their site and put in the functionality it was missing. At that point, we posted one more edition of our unofficial timetables, gave notice to the users that they should migrate to the official site, and shut it down six months later.
The same principles still apply today. Transit information is perishable, information must be kept current in order to be beneficial, and it's easy for well-meaning supporters to actually make things worse. The only difference is the amount of interconnectivity and availability of real-time information.
Railroads now have real-time dispatching information available--if and when we can get that to the user, it's a whole lot more useful than static timetables like the Transit Sydney people are working on
And in fact, most of those railroads _are_ developing apps to get that information to the customer, though they aren't always as fast to get on to new technology such as iPhone apps--they have limited resources and must target them to the largest user bases, which in this case means telephone (see Amtrak's "Julie" for example) and web (see www.vre.org for a good e
reference.com is wrong, how can the US be a democracy when it does not even have a "form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system"? Who is ruling America is the big question, and I seriously believe it is not so much the president anymore, the last American president who had a say was shot by "his very own" administration.