Slashdot Mirror
New York MTA Asserts Copyright Over Schedule
Presto Vivace writes "Greater Greater Washington reports that 'The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority's lawyers are going after a local blogger, and attempting to block an iPhone application showing Metro-North railroad schedules. The blog StationStops writes about Metro-North Commuter Railroad service north of New York City, and often criticizes its operations. Its creator, Chris Schoenfeld, also created an iPhone application to give Metro-North riders schedule information. Now the MTA is insisting he pay them to license the data, and at one point even accused the site of pretending to be an official MTA site.' I can't believe that this the MTA's actions are going to go over well with the public."
The MTA lawyers ought to know that they're persecuting the blogger beyond what copyright law allows. They should be disbarred.
I can't believe that this the MTA's actions are going to go over well with the public.
Unfortunately, very very few people will ever know about this, and even fewer still will give a shit. The MTA lawyers know this, which isn't to say they care who knows.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Not to mention stupid. It's their own best interest to make that information as widely available as possible.
Because it means there is less paper schedules that people just dump into the normal trash?
<< steps up >>
There can be no rational discussion about copyright until people acknowledge
that current copyright laws, created almost entirely to meet corporate interests,
are completely out of whack with people's expectations and with any semblance of
fairness or social good for individuals.
The current norm is "Life + 70 years" with a comprehensive list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries'_copyright_length
This means that *NOTHING* created by artists, musicians, or *ANY* of
the culture created today will move into the public domain in your lifetime
(expected lifetime) unless the people or companies who control the rights let
you have access to it through licensing or sales. You will die first before
the vast majority of today's' culture is available to you legally.
That is absurd. It is not how the intellectual property system was ever
intended to work.
<< / steps down off my soapbox >>
The MTA told the Stamford Advocate that without a license, the iPhone application might provide inaccurate information. [...] Ironically, the MTA's proposed agreement refuses to provide reliable data updates.
I never get tired of listening to the silly reasons people come up with when the *actual* reason is "We hear you're making money off of something. We aren't sure how, but we'd like to be making money off of it instead."
Most likely because they have ads on their web page. This guy is stealing from a revenue stream (in their mind).
Not to mention stupid. It's their own best interest to make that information as widely available as possible.
Not that I agree with what the MTA is doing, but I can see where they might be coming from, if for no other reason from an accuracy standpoint. I'm sure they wouldn't disagree that it is in their best interest to make the information as widely available as possible. However, you'll note that it says that Schoenfeld enters the data manually. What happens when he has a typo or transcribes a column wrong and borks an entire train? Customers get angry because they miss expected connections and blame MTA not Schoenfeld.
Of course they've got other issues where they've supposedly got a deal with some vendor to provide some kind of mobile scheduling service, but I wonder most about the liability MTA could face if people rely on someone's home grown hobby and it goes bad. Sure in the end they'd come out OK, but there'd be lots of bad press and time spent cleaning up the mess.
As one of the posters to the blog pointed out copyright law isn't the proper way to go about this objective. Sadly it's probably just the first thing that came to mind when Director Somensmuck called Legal and said "Johnson? We've got a problem. I want to know what you're going to do about it before you go home tonight."
This sounds like a case for New York Country Lawyer - Defending the innocent and the oppressed against the ungodly weight of the CCI - Combined Copyright Interests! A force for good wherever he goes.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
There is ample evidence on Slashdot, if you're not too lazy to look,* of armchair lawyers coming up with perfectly reasonable precedents that the courts seemingly refused to cite in their decisions. Just because the precedent is there and seemingly applicable doesn't mean the court will follow it.
*I am
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
How about the liability anyone faces for 3rd-party actions not under their control (hint - there is none).
A simple disclaimer would suffice - even one written in Engrish, like the "Do not iron clothes while wearing them" on irons.
Supported in part by public taxes. So, its public data.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think that got thrown out of court; rail and bus information is public domain. They're not obligated to provide it in an easily fetchable format, but it's perfectly ok to republish it as long as you make it clear that you're not the original source.
Because having referenda for everything has worked out great in California.
No, you're thinking of the federal government, and even then it's not quite what you think it is. Unless the government of the state of New York has a law whereby it disclaims copyrights in works it creates, it has federal copyrights in them. This having been said, it would probably be good for the Copyright Act to make all governmental bodies ineligible for copyright, on the grounds that it's no incentive to them. For example, the MTA's decisions regarding creating and publishing a schedule are going to be made without any concern for copyright. It isn't incentivized to do what it otherwise would not do because of copyright.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
You will die first before the vast majority of today's' culture is available to you legally
There is damn little that isn't available legally.
It's just that not everything is available for free.
Entry into the public domain does not guarantee you access to the original - to the master prints or recordings.
It doesn't give you access to unpublished drafts, storyboards, concept designs, deleted scenes, sets, props, costumes, etc.
It does not guarantee funding for storage, restoration or distribution.
This is bullshit. When they arrive at the station and their train is not there, usually they'll ask someone working there or start to complain to someone working there, at which point they'll get informed about the facts of life.
You've obviously never been in a public facing position with an angry New Yorker who's Tom Tom is telling them to go down a road that's closed either. Why should they require their staff to put up with rude and aggressive asshats when the situation is caused by something totally out of their control? Particularly if a guy is pointing to a train schedule on his little computer. Do we honestly expect the average station worker to understand that the schedule on the little computer is someone's hobby? It's hard enough to get one of them to tell you where the public toilets are.
The problem is, a third party service is required to spread the information. In the UK, there are at least 10 different websites, where you can search, book and print anything you could possibly need (including a bus service or a taxi at the destination), and if you're on the move already, you can just send an SMS, and they'll text you back with the information you need.
Yes I know...I've been there done that. I don't know how all of those systems play together but I'd be willing to bet that they are not dependent on some well meaning guy sitting down with a copy of the schedule keying in timetables by hand. Chance are there is an official API or some other way for all the third parties to grab the data directly which cuts the risk of human error down significantly. In an ideal world MTA would come up with a way to accommodate what is obviously a public demand for the information.
Again I don't agree with what MTA's doing, but this is the only place where I think they might have a legitimate concern. It does not justify horrid abuses of copyright law however.
The MTA is supposedly providing a public service in transporting people from one place to another.
In order for that service to actually be useful, a published schedule is required.
For that published schedule to be useful it must be Accurate, Timely, Accessible, Sufficient, and Understandable to the great majority of the public.
If the MTAs published schedule met these minimum requirements, there would be no viable market for third party involvement.
Since there obviously IS a third party market, it stands to reason that the MTA is not providing one or more of the requirements to be useful, to the public it is supposed to be serving.
So a third party steps in to provide that service. It's the American way, and I say the MTA should spend more effort making sure their published information is actually useful to their customers.
Thought I would take a look at the local transit system and see if they had similar restrictions.
http://www.bart.gov/siteinfo/copyright.aspx
Sure seems like it!
"Copyright
All content on the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) website (http://www.bart.gov) including the collection, arrangement, assembly and presentation of pages and all logos, maps, text, images, feeds and databases are the property of BART or its content suppliers and are protected by copyright laws.
You may not use the BART logo, the BART map or any other content from the BART website without express written permission in advance from BART."
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Whiney pusses and crybabies. "Oh, I missed the train by a minute and a half, now I'll have to wait for FIFTEEN MINUTES for the next train!!"
Oh boo hoo. He should have pulled his pecker out of - wherever - a few minutes earlier, so that he could have some TIME to catch the train. If his source of information was faulty, well, he had an opportunity to use another source. Why didn't he pick up a dead-tree version of the schedule last month? Finally, I'm forced to ask - who gives a damn if this inept dilrod is late for some stupid appointment, anyway? He's been riding trains most of his life, and hasn't figured out how things work yet? Screw him.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
>>>Why should they require their staff to put up with rude and aggressive asshats
Because that's what they are paid to do. Just the same as when I worked for JCPenney years ago, I was required to put-up with angry customers complaining about broken products, or late fees on credit cards, or whatever. It's called customer service, and you are expected to be patient with the customer, whether he's happy or angry.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
rail and bus information is public domain.
Even more than that, information is in the public domain. You cannot copyright the fact that a particular train is supposed to arrive at a particular stop at a particular time. You may be able to copyright your layout of your brochure, and the nifty graphics you put all over it, but there is no creative expression to the fact of a bus schedule.
And still more, is convenience and efficiency so anathema to government that they feel the need to stamp it out wherever they see it, even if it's not costing them anything? Have they considered that maybe MORE people will ride the rail system if they have schedules conveniently accessible?
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
The problem isn't that it's government-run. It's that it's a monopoly, and you can't go elsewhere. But you can't go installing 2 sets of train-tracks everywhere, so the monopoly is a necessary evil.
I think the problem that they have, is a loss of control over the information.
If something goes wrong, intentional or otherwise, and the schedule that all these people look at through the phone is incorrect... who's gonna get the angry customer call? The train company.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I hate PC comments like yours. It should not be anyone's responsibility to warn blazing fools not to put steaming hot coffee in their lap and try to drive, or not to iron clothes while wearing them, or that a jar of peanuts contains (wait for it) PEANUTS! Yeah that last one is a real warning message, pick a jar of peanuts and read it for your self. Anyone ignorant enough to not know that a jar of peanuts contains peanuts needs a lifetime treatment at the local electrical shock therapy center.
I am so tired of this "label anything because someone might sue you for them being an idiot" fad. It should be an affirmative defense of anyone that you are not responsible for other people being too stupid to live. Maybe that was your point. I hope so.
Except Blackwater faces real competition (from similar outfits world-wide), while MTA is enjoying government-like monopoly power over millions of people.
In a parallel sub-thread I argue, that benefits of having a single outfit run the "natural monopoly" is dwarfed by the losses from stupidity, complacency, and outright corruption, that inevitably befall such outfits.
One only needs to recall AT&T, and what it did with its monopoly on "long-distance" phone service... But, at least, AT&T was profitable...
Their ability to raise tolls at whim surely helps. In Massachusetts, the toll-collector's salary can reach $90K. In New York it is very good money as well — for a job, that requires nothing, but high school diploma. Why does it have to be a cushy union-backed position, rather than something like burger-flipping, that a youngster (or someone down on their luck temporarily) can always count on? It does not have to be this way, of course, but it is, because MTA need not compete with anybody (unlike burger-chains)...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm sure they wouldn't disagree that it is in their best interest to make the information as widely available as possible. However, you'll note that it says that Schoenfeld enters the data manually.
There is a simple solution here, which I'm sure everyone on Slashdot has already spotted. OTOH paying a lawyer vast sums of money to sue people is easier than paying a programmer moderate sums to add a formatted text download to their website.
But this isn't Germany. I don't know what Germany's copyright law says about it, but in the US you can't copyright data -- only its representation. Douglas Adams coupd copyright HHGTG, but he could't copyright the act of blowing up the earth, or putting a fish in your ear to translate.
In the US, you can't copyright a phone book, OR a bus schedule. This is the most absurd thing I've heard of all week, and it's Friday.
Free Martian Whores!
I won't comment on the legalities of copyright (IANAL) or the tactics MTA is using (they may have shot themselves in the foot), but there are very good reasons for MTA to want to keep control of their schedule information and limit third-party distribution.
Yes, third parties can often get information out to the public in a faster and more accessible manner than transportation companies, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. I should know--I was responsible for the project that first put Amtrak schedules online, back in the Gopher era and then in the early years of the WWW. We also did online schedules for several commuter rail systems, including MTA's, in those early years.
Most important _is_ ensuring that the data is maintained and kept up to date. Having outdated schedules up for download is worse than having no schedules at all. This is not a matter of 'boo hoo, you missed the train by one minute because you were relying on your iPhone--be early next time' as one commenter put it: sometimes the changes can be pretty substantial, especially as a result of construction projects. And yes, the company gets blamed even when the fault is someone else's.
Second, it is _not_ helpful to undercut the system's own communications department. They may not be as fast as you in putting out an app, but they may have something much more useful in process, such as an app that can link to a dispatching database and provide real-time departure information (see NJ Transit's new Departure Vision beta, for example). With all due respect to your programming skill and interface design ideas, users are usually better off with information direct from the source.
Finally, put yourself in the shoes of the system. When we were distributing a downloadable version of Amtrak's timetable, we had a pretty difficult time trying to convince well-meaning individuals not to repost them on their own boards, and getting the ones who had done so to take down outdated editions. They may be dealing with other people who want to do the same thing as you, and all of this at the same time as they're trying to add new features to the official sites.
If you want to do something like this, either as a public service or for profit, the right thing to do is to communicate with the system and get their permission first. Ranting on Slashdot about copyright, government bureaucracies or about the lousy on-time performance of the system's operating side (actually, Metro-North's on-time performance is exemplary--best in the nation) is not constructive. Find out what is in the pipeline, and if you still think there's a need for the kind of information you can provide or the mechanism for delivering it, make the case to the system's customer service people, and you'll probably get a green light and a good deal of cooperation.
Matt Mitchell
Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers
www.dvarp.org
Try Google Maps.
Seriously, try it. It's pretty neat the way they've integrated MTA schedules, with the MTA's blessing.
Doubtlessly that is why the MTA is making such a fuss.
Companies like Google pay them for the privilege of hosting this information. If a popular freeware app does the same thing, then those companies will be less likely to shell out to the MTA. Those third-party companies will say to the MTA, "Why should we pay you for the scheduling information? That guy there uses the same info but he doesn't have to pay for it; obviously this info is public domain! Plus, nobody is visiting our website for that info anyway, because they are all using the aforementioned application and thus we'll never make back the money we paid you".
The MTA considers their schedules a source of revenue and StationStops is threatening this.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
I don't think granting copyright to a municipality for a train schedule is in any way constitutional. Of course, as Lessig failed at pointing out to the Supreme Court, neither is a limitless copyright term.
Free Martian Whores!