On Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 4:31 PM Brian May <b...@mapwise.com> wrote: > This may have been stated already, but just wanted to make it clear - > State laws on public records filter down through all regional and local > governments operating within the state. So if state law doesn't > explicitly give a county permission to copyright data, and the county > tries to assert copyright, the county is violating state law. If you can > get a hold of the data, you can ignore whatever the county says. If you > can't get the data and must get it from the agency through formal > channels, you need to send a letter and explain the situation. If they > don't respond favorably, try the state Attorney General's office. In > Florida, the Attorney General weighed in on this issue in the mid-2000s > because counties weren't getting the message after a court case > clarified the that public records could not be copyrighted or sold at > exorbitant prices in Florida for "cost recovery". At that time the > Attorney General's office had an open records advocate that would help > educate, communicate, and mediate with local governments about public > records laws.
You oversimplify. I won't go through the complex history again - but: New York's open records law is silent about a county's using copyright to restrict the distribution of records that it is required to supply free of charge. The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that the state law's silence on the matter means that counties may assert copyright on their work product, and explicitly refused to accord deference to an advisory opinion from the state to the contrary. Since Federal law governs on matters of copyright, it is now settled that counties own their copyrights. The legislature could amend the Freedom of Information Law to require that counties offer a general public license or even abrogate their copyrights, but it has not done so. This leads to the bizarre legal outcome where you can demand a copy of any of Suffolk County's tax maps for your own use (if you can find the plat number) but you may not copy the map yourself without violating the county's copyright. (To the extent that the copyright is valid in the first place. The court did not reach the facts of the case to determine whether the works in question met the Feist standard.) I am given to understand that there is a circuit split on the matter, and in fact that the Second is the only Circuit to craft such a loophole to open government laws. Recall that the Second is the circuit where, for a time, it was held that West Publishing held copyright on the page numbers in their court reporters, and that those who wished to cite them in briefs owed West a license fee for using the numbers. Fortunately, that fell when Bender v West was reheard en banc. The State government, and the New York City government, fortunately for us, engage in no such nonsense. New York City's open government law was drafted after Suffolk v First American and has explicit language forbidding such games. _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
