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Controversy Over San Francisco Public Transportation Data

Posted by Soulskill on from the information-wants-to-be-expensive-sometimes dept.

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."

3 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Lost money? by Ironsides · · Score: 4, Informative

    The question becomes, "So, OK, you have paid to develop this data, but why? It is, after all, public data."

    This gets into the contracts and the "data rights" agreements. For example, there are a few different contracts that can be set up even when a government pays a company to develop an application.

    No Data Rights: The customer (government) buys the application and can use it as is. The customer gets no detailed information, source code or redistribution rights, just an end product.
    Trade-off: The developer charges less for development as they believe they will be able to sell it elsewhere or further develop it as the sole source.

    Limited Data Rights: The customer buys the application and has full access to the detailed information, source code, etc. However, it can not be redistributed for a number of years (say, 5). After that number of years, the customer has full data rights.
    Trade-off: The developer charges slightly more for development, as they will not have a monopoly on the product after a few years.

    Full Data Rights: The customer has full access to everything necessary to duplicate and modify the product immediately.
    Trade-off: The developer chargers more as they can not guarantee that they will make any further money off of the product.

    It's like professional photographers. It's a picture of you, but if you want a copy, you're going to have to pay for it. If you want the negatives, you're going to have to pay for those as well. There are further variations that combine these ones, but they give you an idea of the three types that get modified for an actual contract. From the article, it sounds like NBIS is trying to claim that SF doesn't have the data rights to redistribute the information beyond a specific set of applications/methods. To figure out what the truth is, we would need to read the contracts.

    --
    Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
  2. Re:Lost money? by mmarlett · · Score: 4, Informative
    The city of San Francisco says that it is a no data rights agreement. From the article:

    Muni spokesperson Judson True says ... that, no, Muni owns the data in question and that the public is, of course, entitled to access it. In fact, he went even further: Muni isn't just giving us all permission to access the data, they're also committed to finding ways to make it easier to get to it.

  3. Re:This is only the beginning by igjeff · · Score: 5, Informative

    They lost, and they lost rather completely.

    Here's a starting point for exploring some of this data. There's probably more places where this data is available from the NWS in very open formats, and I believe more is to come.

    http://www.weather.gov/rss/