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."

Comments

Disbarment

[DoofusOfDeath]

The MTA lawyers ought to know that they're persecuting the blogger beyond what copyright law allows. They should be disbarred.

Re:Disbarment

[Anonymous Coward]

After being punted around by a lawyer over lots of BS, leading to the loss of my home, its clear to me the bar for disbarment is pretty high.

Re:Disbarment

[michaelhood]

DNRTFA but there's no misconduct in sending what amounts to a cease & desist to someone. Anyone can do this, lawyer or not. A C&D is not a court action, it's just a scary looking letter on expensive paper.

IANAL.

Re:This is will never fly in the courts

[Jurily]

Not to mention stupid. It's their own best interest to make that information as widely available as possible.

copyright length insanity

[drDugan]

<< 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 >>

Re:copyright length insanity

[drDugan]

Why exactly is this a problem?

Great question. I don't have a great answer. Not everyone sees the current situation as a problem, which is copyright is the way it is today.

Here is what I think, and from that, others perhaps will understand why I think the current situation is unreasonable.

Intellectual property, like property, is a complete social fiction - its a very useful one, but nonetheless - a fiction.

Property is a big unspoken social agreement we have that assigns resources to individuals and entities and gives them superior rights of control over those resources. This assignment we call "ownership", and is a critical part to nonviolent resource distribution with many independent entities. In civil society it is simply given that this property mapping of things to people/organizations is "real", but in fact it is only supported, like all rules, (both laws and social mores) if people generally agree - both agree that the rules are reasonable, and agree that they each will (in the vast majority) follow those rules. If people don't agree, laws don't work.

Intellectual property extends the idea of this big shared social mapping of resources (property) to intangible "intellectual" creations (written words, music, video and most anything translatable into computer bits). The basic idea of intellectual property says that if one entity (person, company) did a lot of work in creating something, they should have superior rights to control it for a while. By itself, this is a very reasonable idea.

On the other hand, there is no physical basis to support property rights on information objects like there are on working land or creating physical things. Many would argue extremely convincingly that in a highly connected world, most people would be much better off if there were no intellectual property at all. That only those large organizations profiting from culture creation and limiting access to culture would be those harmed by eliminating IP entirely.

However, most important to the debate from my perspective is one of culture. The shared actions of humans that create the beauty, education, entertainment, and everyday existence for human beings is now encoded very often in digital information used to create experiences we all share. The fundamental question at hand is this: are we better off with human experience owned by corporations, or not? To me, this is the essence of the whole copyright debate - it has nothing to do with the specifics of law or legality, the politics of lobbying groups, or even the money people make off IP - it has to do with what kind of entity gets to create and control human culture, and whether it happens primarily by and for individuals in an open way, or whether it happens primarily under corporate ownership in a closed way.

Currently, we unequivocally have the latter. Large corporations primarily own the most valuable and most widely shared cultural elements in all 1st-world countries. The length of copyright basically only benefits and perpetuates corporations now. Governments with WIPO and other treaties are trying to enforce long, strong copyright protections globally. Its not individuals' creative expression driving how we live, how we think, how we get news and information, how we are entertained, how we are educated - but rather (and I'm being extremely general here) - it is corporations. These statements are extremely broad and there are many counter examples, but I'm referring to the largest factors and the most momentum in society.

I see it as unreasonable that culture created today will never be available to me openly and legally in my lifetime. The only reason the system works this way is because large companies profit more from IP working this way than other ways. The social fiction of IP is no longer a good deal for the individual in this case. This basic understanding that this legal fiction is no longer a good deal for individuals is why so many people redistribute mus

Best part of the article:

[SOdhner]

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."

Re:Why would a transit company....

[jmyers]

Most likely because they have ads on their web page. This guy is stealing from a revenue stream (in their mind).

Re:This is will never fly in the courts

[DutchSter]

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."

Re:This is will never fly in the courts

[tomhudson]

I wonder most about the liability MTA could face if people rely on someone's home grown hobby and it goes bad.

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.

Re:Didn't this happen not too long ago..

[chrome]

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.

Re:Referendum

[Ma8thew]

Because having referenda for everything has worked out great in California.

Public Service

[Mike Rice]

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.

Re:BART has similar copyright claims

[apenzott]

One hand taketh, another hand giveth.
http://www.bart.gov/developers/
It appears that BART has said to the scrapers; "Here is the data you need in raw form along with some suggested tools you can integrate our schedules into your applications."
On the whole, it looks like BART has embraced these applications rather than raise a stink on them.

Re:Didn't this happen not too long ago..

[X0563511]

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.

Holy Hell!

[celtic_hackr]

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.