The Modern Journalist

Oregon Organizations Press Legislature to Allow Publishing Public Records

There’s an interesting story at Ars Technica today about two non-profit agencies pressing a government agency to allow it to publish — with formatting — part of the Revised Code on their sites.

The story is complex, and since I haven’t been involved I’m reticent to weigh in on the specifics of the matter; however, the underlying issue of building and distributing databases seems particularly at the heart of much of what we’ve been discussing both here and on the social network site in the last few weeks.

It seems the heart of the matter is whether an organization can own the format that datasets are kept and distributed. I was under the impression that how you stored information was protected even if — as is this case — the actual data wasn’t.

More importantly, if the format is protected — but it’s a government agency doing the protecting — should the government be allowed to hold that data/format within a system that can’t be shared even if the data is public information?

My initial reaction to the questions I posed, which could be off base, are: you DO have the right to copyright format but the government SHOULDN’T have the right to create public data in a closed format.

This type of question was answered, in part, in this court case about data (or information as the court calls it) in a phone book.

The ruling, as stated in Wikipedia, found that the data/information was fair game as long as the new user only took the data/information, which I believe matches up with my earlier assertion that format — not data — is protected.

A disturbing question, then, is this: can the court say the government can provide their information in whatever format they want and require the citizens to — if they want it — hand-code the data into a new format?

That would obviously create a serious impediment to public databases, making it much harder for the citizenry to use and interact with government data.

A ruling in that nature would put a serious crimp in my belief that these databases should be the launching point for modern news organizations.

The wrangling also calls into question a fight that was waged, and largely lost, in the late 90s and early aughts about the role of copyright.

Digital music companies continually argued that restricting copyright did little else but protect the business model of existing entertainment companies while squashing emerging forces of distribution. The “chilling effect” these lawsuits had was to slow innovation around digital distribution.

Where there were once scores of companies building distribution models, now there are only a handful — many under the control of the recording industry.

In business, I can understand the market effects. I am not enamored with modern copyright law, but I understand how it’s applied. I am less inclined to have my government assert copyright protection over data gathered on its citizenry.