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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."

2 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is only the beginning by ScrewMaster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Look at the outfits that monetize the NOAA's data: that's public information as well. The NOAA was "publishing" this information in a very complicated binary format, and these outfits were making a ton of money in converting it to other purposes. I remember reading here on Slashdot a couple years ago that the government was thinking of making weather data available in XML or some other standard format, and that a couple of these outfits went after them in court to try and prevent it (thereby preserving their distribution lock.) I don't know what the eventual outcome of that was.

    --
    The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  2. Re:Me things he looses by nbauman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If I pay to collect the data & generate a database that doesn't mean that I can be forced to give the data away. But also, I can't stop anybody else from collecting the data & making their own database. If you don't want to buy it from me go forth & make your own database

    That's an interesting argument, and it's logical from where you're coming from.

    But the copyright law comes at it from a different direction.

    If you go to a lot of effort to collect data, that's commendable. In copyright law, that's called "sweat of the brow."

    But in copyright law, you can't copyright data that you've collected just by sweat of the brow. It also takes some kind of creativity or innovation or judgment.

    That's what the Supreme Court decided in Feist. Phone numbers can't be copyrighted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service