The USPS-Selling Zip Codes or Public Information?

An Anonymous Coward asks: "What is the definition of public information? Would you think that the official names of cities and their Zip Codes would be public? In a way it is, because the USPS will allow you to do a lookup against their online database. The tricky part is trying to get the entire list, then the USPS wants you to pay. They could very easily provide the information in any database or comma delimited format on their website but they choose not to. Why? They are making a lot of money reselling this information to companies who repackage it and then sell it to the public. " Hmm...good point. But are zipcodes really public information?

Comments

ZIP is freely available. ZIP+4 is difficult

[toastyman]

You can find databases of City/State to ZIP databases easily. What's actually valuable are more detailed databases.

For those not in the US, our postal codes (called ZIP codes) are 5 digits long. Every city has at least one, and some have many many more. In the early 90's, the post office added 4 digits to it, to narrow down to at least the street level, making computer sorting possible.

For me to translate '60618' to being 'Chicago, IL' is something that's pretty easy. I believe that old BSD distro's even came with a text file with all the zip codes. To translate my address to '60618-1481' is much more difficult. Even being able to tell which chicago zipcode my address belongs in (60618 is one of many), requires a full address database.

It's not really plausable to put a database this size up on the net. Several companies also pay the USPS a licensing fee to sell the database. Many also do 'value-added' additions, such as time zones, and the such. The last time I checked, a compressed database for the entire US to give street level zip lookups was around 4 CD's worth. I don't believe the USPS can justify the bandwidth costs in letting people download it, especially when a database of this size has to be difficult to maintain. (It's somewhere around 40 million records)

This company sells a pretty comprehensive set of CD's. It's not too expensive considering what you get. Especially if you send large amounts of mail, being able to verify the address/zipcode before you pay the 33 cents is nice.

Basically, Downloading a database this size isn't plausable for them, so they pretty much have to sell it on physical media... Now, if their raw data (not data that OEM's have added) is copyrightable, who knows. Perhaps one person can buy the raw data and put it on their ftp server? Who knows.

I thought it was illegal for government agencies to apply for copyrights... or was it patents? (I know there's the loophole for patents that an outside company can apply for the patent, then transfer it to the government)

Kevin

Public Information, F.O.I.A, and accessibility....

[trims]

Zip codes are public information. As are street addresses, with the associated occupant name. However, the issue here is not of access to the information (the Freedom of Information Act guarrantees you can get it), but the ease with which you can get it.

The FOIA says nothing about the format, or relative accessibility of the information that you request. The government is not obligated to give it to you in the format or way you want it. They just have to give it to you. People who've done research into alot of old events can atest to this: rather than get a nicely indexed and annotated set of transcripts, they get a huge stack of unlabeled and unsorted documents. Digging through them is the effort.

Honestly, I don't have a problem with it this way. The government shouldn't be in the business of neatly packaging everything for anyone who asks. Deliberately hiding the truth is one thing, but they've got alot better things than being able to give any Tom, Dick, or Harry a complete, nicely pressed and indexed book of any random information they request.

That's the value-add that those companies selling the Zip-codes have. They get the info from the govn't (which might have done some pre-sorting it for their convenience, and rightly charges for it), and then package it up for you to use in a slick format. You can get the information from any Post Office you ask, but I'm sure it's not going to be in a nice electronic format. After all, you're getting it for free.

Honestly, people, we're getting really lazy these days.

-Erik

Publicly available from me, I think

[Bruce Perens]

If you look at my free U.S. street map data There are zip+4 codes and congressional district boundaries in there, and they are not encumbered.

Bruce