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Controversy Over San Francisco Public Transportation Data
paimin writes "A struggle is breaking out in San Francisco over whether the developer of a publicly-funded installation of real-time tracking for the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency has a right to control the use of data from the system. The situation is not totally clear, but this sure seems like an attempt to use patent threats to hijack public data. The city paid for the system, and the developer claims he lost money on the deal, so now he's shutting down applications like Routesy and Munitime that use data from the system unless they license the 'copyrighted' data from him."
Just because you lose money doesn't mean you can change the rules after the fact. I guess this guy shouldn't have bid so low to get that contract.
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This isn't the first time someone has used this data; looks like they're too scared to go after the big guys.
http://maps.google.com/intl/en/landing/transit/
Gee - last I heard - you couldn't copyright a database. Further, unless he specifically provided for it in his contract up front, work done for hire belongs to he who pays. If you under-price your services, that isn't the cities fault.
Finally, what about the guy who thought he was HELPING the city and county of SF by not giving the other admins the passwords. They locked his butt up. SF doesn't play nice when under pressure.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
The developer, at least in the linked articles, does not claim that it has lost money on the system. It simply claims to own the data and that it has licensed the exclusive rights (from another private company) to develop with the data. The question becomes, "So, OK, you have paid to develop this data, but why? It is, after all, public data."
Gee - last I heard - you couldn't copyright a database.
sounds like he copied his business practices from Microsoft. maybe he copyrighted copying other companies business practices also?
"To stop the terrorists."
Problem solved.
It may be bus arrival times in San Francisco today, but this whole notion of data being exclusive property isn't new and isn't going away. And if Bilski stands and ends up partially undermining software patents, then I would hazard a guess that more companies are going to try monetizing the data aggregates and outputs. Even without Bilski as software becomes more of a commodity market, then data and data aggregates will become the value market.
This isn't a new concept. The public pays for scientific research at an institution of higher learning also funded by tax dollars, yet sometimes the only way you could get a copy of the results is pay for an expensive subscription to a scientific journal, which claims copyright on the published data.
This case probably isn't a good example and the developer trying to be the data gatekeeper is going to lose, but it's only the beginning. There will be more.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Seems a comparable situation to when students have claimed rights over their own work that has been funded by their university. As i recall they all ended up with the university winning.
I also seem to recall a few occations of similar stuff where workers stuff was claimed by their employers, also tended to go in favour of the employer, usually especially so because it was stated in whatever contract
I thought you there was no copyright on data under US law. C.f. the OpenStreetMap legal issues http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262. There may be contractual rights in the picture, but only if those were negotiated already.
They are hoping the City won't take it to court, but settle the case. It's a type of judicial blackmail to make back the $$$ they lost.
1) The patent only grants exlusivity to the owner for the method itself, not the data.
2) The data is intrinisically owned by the City of SF.
Both these points will destroy and generally make the company look like money grubbing greed-monsters from the netherrealm.
NextBus' patents do not play a role in this. It is just plain access and who gets to play gatekeeper. Overall bizarre but one would expect that the City could usher one of their staff attorneys in and send NextBus Information System a c&d.
I don't know, I really hope not. But my guess is that this douche-bag NBIS company could hire enough lawyers to make it not worth anyones money to find out. Their only interest is protecting their own application.
Also remember this is a small subsidiary of the real company that produces the prediction software and system. Someone thought it'd be a good idea to try to sell mobile applications to consumers, so they split off what looks like a dinky subsidiary. The really stupid thing is this works at cross-purposes of the REAL company (the one who likely makes all the money) who just wants to sell these systems to cities to improve their transit systems. Having a strong developer community developing software that interacts with YOUR system is a hell of a lot smarter that trying to protect the tiny amount of revenue this kind of application can provide.
AccountKiller
If the data could be copyrighted, ownership would go to the creator of the data. That would be the city of SF, not the programmer. They created the data with the software they contracted him to produce for them, then they ran their software on their hardware, watching their mass transit movements and recording the results on their computers. The programmer could not own the data because he could not create it. He has no mass transit system with which to do so.
In any case, it is highly unlikely anyone could copyright the data. Copyright requires at least minimal creativity. Data produced automatically requires no creativity. In addition, works produced by the government (ie. by the public for their own good via their chosen representatives) cannot be copyrighted.
The programmers actions are likely to be considered by the court (unless he backs down very quickly) blackmail. These days, if the actions threaten public safety, they might even be considered terrorism. Under these charges, even if he backs down the damage is done and he might well be looking at many years in prison. The SF DA could file such charges to scare him as they often do with other charges. But terrorism charges tend to go all the way through once the process is started. To prevent others from trying this stunt, they may well do just this. And I hope they do.
The contract may have given him the right to use the data. There's no doubt it my mind that it did not give him sole use, much less state that he also had sole control over its use. There's no way the SF city attorneys would have allowed that in a contract.
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yust yoking youse yall :p
To me the author of the article is deliberately confusing public timetables with transmissions showing the position and expected arrival times of a bus.
If the position and expected arrival time is calculated on the fly, that's more of a service than just pure publically available data. If the condition of this service being provided is that the data is confidential or restricted to licensees. The provided data is processed real time using their equiptment and code. It's one thing to say "at 2:12pm the bus is 5 miles from transponder 2A, 1/5 mile from 4B and 8 miles from 1E" which is pure statistics (albeit collected from private equiptment), but to say "it's just left the anystreet stop and will arrive at noname plaza in 6 minutes in the current traffic conditions", could be seen as editorialising. If you're able to get as much of this information whenever you want, it then goes beyond fair use too.
An extreme argument of what the author is saying could be this: The fact that Michael Jackson died is public fact, a 400 word article going into the detail of how he died is copyrighted and subject to fair use restrictions. The interesting argument that applies here is, if that same news report was machine generated based on a few facts fed into it and the rest padded out through AI, could you copyright that?
Gee - last I heard - you couldn't copyright a database.
Yeah, that's what I heard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service
I met the inventor of NextBus some years ago at the Hacker's Conference. What they get from the bus is position, speed, and a few bits of data like the destination sign setting, "doors open" and "wheelchair lift deployed". After much crunching on this data, info like "Next bus at this stop: 6 minutes" comes out. Over time, as more data comes in, the predictions get better. It's a good machine learning problem, because you have actuals; you can tell when the bus eventually gets to the stop, so you have hard data from which to validate the prediction algorithm. You don't even need a map.
The early business plan for NextBus had a little dedicated receiver they were going to sell to consumers. The idea was that you have one at home, and it tells you the number of minutes until the next bus gets to the stop near your house, so you know when to leave the house. That was before the World Wide Web, so that wasn't necessary.
Originally, Muni management hated the system, because it was too honest about their bad service. But after much political effort, eventually it was deployed on a few lines, where it was very popular. Then it was put in everywhere.
Muni probably owns the raw data, and NextBus probably owns the predictions. I'm not sure on that, though.
> ...attempt to use patent threats... ... ...unless they license the 'copyrighted' data...
>
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Is this about patents or copyrights? BTW data is not protected by copyright in the USA.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
What company would I pay that has a silly mandate such as this. I would rather eat nails then let such a deal be struck by my lawyers! I would never talk to or deal with a nitwit who claims right or tries to claim right to my data. He is awaiting the loss of his assets due to incomprehensible lack of new business! That would be like the creators of a 3d animation program claiming to own the rights to a movie because their software was used. Good luck !
That clearly deserves a raise, what a great business man!
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People should be furious about this, as a long-time MUNI rider I waited over 5 years to get this system working. Secondly, why aren't I reading about this in the Chronicle or SFgate.com? MUNI sucks worse then any of you all can possibly imagine. Management is incompetent, buses often come two in a row back to back then nothing for 45 minutes. Emplyees get bonuses for being extra rude to passengers, well at least it seems that way. Buses are old, and dirty. The coup d' gras? They're raising the fare to $2(US) in 2 days. FAIL.
You would think this would already be in the contract they signed. I mean, it's not only programmers who have to guess the possible errors users will make ("Enter the number of fingers on your right hand: [Same as my left.]"). Lawyers and consultants should have stipulations if something doesn't occur as planned. Point to page Section 27, paragraph 3, and avoid the cheesy media coverage.
After I moved to SF, I sold my car. No need for it here.
Unless, of course, you ever want to leave SF for any reason. I know there's some decent public transportation to surrounding areas, but it's far from comprehensive, especially after the sun goes down.
Speaking of public transportation, it sure would be nice to get BART up here (I live in Santa Rosa). Fuck you Marin County, fuck you very much.
Knowledge != Intelligence
Ahh, but in this case the data that is being collected is bus location information. The information the everyone wants access to is the bus route timing predictions. Those are created via some complex code that looks at the location information and other parameters and information to produce a prediction of when the bus is to arrive. This information may well be copyrighted as it is not "in plain view" but is generated via some creativity.
Now, if someone else were to generate their own predictions from the actual raw information that is one thing. But just redistributing the predictions generated by NextBus sounds like taking propriatory information and distributing it without the consent of those who created it.
Muni probably owns the raw data, and NextBus probably owns the predictions.
NextBus is the developer, but the litigious company in this case is called NextBus Information Systems (NBIS). NBIS claims to own rights to the data NextBus's apps produce. It's unclear whether the two companies have any other financial relationship -- if they have any at all. As far as we know, NBIS may be a rogue, an SCO of the transit info business.
You can't sell an iPhone app unless Apple agrees. Someone doesn't like your app and writes a water-muddying letter to Apple. Apple doesn't like muddy water and pulls app from store. No other means of distribution. Geek squashed.
Ergo, don't buy an iPhone and don't produce apps for iPhones. Problem solved.
I'm confused. Is this a patent problems thread, or a some-government-official-screwed-up-a-contract-again thread?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I just interviewed all of the parties except gray island ceo. the audio can be heard at http://seniordad.com/SrDad/SFBR/SFBR.html