The Ohio Supreme Court ruled last week that a county engineer was within his rights under the state’s public records law to charge $2,000 for a copy of public real estate database, according to Court News Ohio.
In a 6-1 per curiam opinion, the court held that Opperman met the requirements of the Ohio Public Records Act by offering to provide Gambill with a copy of the county’s electronic database containing deed information and aerial photos of all property in the county if Gambill paid the estimated $2,000 cost of separating that data from proprietary mapmaking software protected by U.S. patent laws that is “inextricably intertwined” with the data on the engineer’s computer.
Among the court’s sources for the ruling is an affidavit from the county engineer, Craig Opperman:
64. Without the ESRI software program the data cannot be compiled in a readable format as it is provided at the Scioto County Engineer’s Office.
65. The Scioto County Engineer’s Office can not separate the data from the ESRI software program files.
Reading through the ruling, it appears the court thought (possibly with the engineer’s encouragement) there was no way to view the data except in ArcView or ArcGIS publisher.
That would seem, on its face, false, as ArcGIS publisher says on its site:
Had the engineer exported a Shapefile, it could have been viewed using free software without violating ESRI’s copyright.
The court ruled six-to-one in favor of the county. The one dissenting judge, Paul E. Pfeifer, saw the legal implications of this ruling:
The county engineer in this case has intertwined public records with proprietary software and expects citizens seeking public records to pay an exorbitant price to untie the knot. A person seeking public records should expect to pay the price for copying the records, but not the price for a public entity’s mistake in purchasing inefficient software. Will every citizen asking for what relator, Robert Gambill, seeks—access to records that the majority acknowledges are public records—also have to pay $2,000? The holding in this case encourages public entities desiring secrecy to hide public records within a software lockbox and require individual citizens to provide the golden key to unlock it.
Many thanks to members of the NICAR-L listserv for sharing their experience with ESRI products and pointing me to the original ruling.
Wow. You’ve successfully fact-checked a court ruling, and a pretty lopsided ruling, at that. I’ve come across ESRI in my thesis work on crisismapping, and the company is careful to support data interchange formats (APIs and SDKs) to limit the downsides of their proprietary software.
http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/spring11articles/open-source-technology-and-esri.html
Maybe you should file an amicus brief? This seems like a ruling that’s not only incorrect, but also establishes an awful precedent.
Unfortunately for this particular applicant, they have failed to compile and submit evidence properly and accordingly the court has laboured under false facts found to be true on the available evidence. In a future case, the applicant would submit evidence of ESRI’s ability to export data to proper open formats. This is one of the benefits of having a good lawyer or a clear-thinking individual on your side.
Some people think that you just show up to the court and whinge, and the judge solves all your problems. That’s not the judge’s job. In the common law system, you whinge to your lawyer, then he translates that into a legal argument and collects evidence, and asks the judge for a remedy. The judge just says yes or no.
The evidentiary record in this case was woeful. The idea that ESRI had “intertwined” tax map data with software files is very suspect. I have never used ESRI but it defies common sense that each data file would have software in it.
The legal principle (which is what would bind future courts) is that the applicant pays for any contractors, which is uncontroversial. The dissent is a confused attempt to force a “common sense” outcome on the basis of the nonsense case before the court. Judges do nobody any favours when they do this. You have to stick to the law and the case at hand, as presented, otherwise you start making decisions which are wrong but which, in the circumstances, seem right — it sounds noble except that the twisted principles you create just mess up the law for future courts.
The county engineer didn’t put the data in a magic locked box. If an official does that, they’d not be able to use it themselves. The majority’s principles are sound but the applicant’s lawyers dropped the ball.