The information is already free...

[maradydd]

...but getting that across to NMBS is taking some doing

Comments

[anonymous]

a nationalised company isn't owned by the citizens but by the entity that serves as the nation.

also, information being publicly available doesn't necessarily give anyone the right to recreate/redistribute it.

the NMBS has every right to have this redistribution of it's data shut down, but it's tremendously silly to do so and if brought to court, I doubt they'd even win.

imo, tuinslak should show some spine and tell them to take it to court.

[maradydd]

So who makes up the entity that serves as the nation, if it isn't the people?

I do hope he makes them take it to court, and I've offered to help make that happen -- one of the primary ways that entities like NMBS get away with bullshit takedown requests is by making it too expensive for victims to be able to defend themselves successfully, but fortunately we have organisations like the EFF whose mission statement is to help people establish viable defences against just these sorts of overbroad claims.

[darthzeth]

In fairness, being a citizen, or even a stock holder in a corporation, doesn't give you the same rights to the property owned by the country or corporation that you would have over your own property. I can't just borrow my town's cop car because it belongs to be in a philosophical sense.

But yeah, intellectual 'property' claims by a Public company on redistributing information that is already freely available doesn't actually serve any purpose. IP law is just broken in this case. I'd think that any 'ip' created by the government or a public entity should automatically be public domain.

[maradydd]

It's encouraging to see that in the US, public funding institutions like the NIH are going the way of openness. Journal articles funded by NIH money must now be made available via PubMed Central within twelve months of publication, under the NIH's Public Access Policy, which is pretty awesome -- and PMC also encourages (and provides infrastructure for) authors to make their data available to the public, which is even better.

[mouser]

I was going to ask about if the citizens of Belgium actually had the "Fair Usage" rights of such data.

Uh, the De Standaard article translates the S&D order based on "the criminal offense of counterfeiting". Is it possible that they think he's representing himself or his app as part of NMBS?

The other possibility is that he's charging for the app, which a bureaucrat somewhere decided was illegal.

Either way; yeah, it's stupid.

[maradydd]

I'm still making my way through the body of law on the subject, and it's slow going due to the language barrier, but I think it's going to turn on the issue of droit moral (since we're based on the Napoleonic code, not the common law with which I am much more familiar).

The app was free to use; I don't think it even had advertising, though I'd have to double-check on that. (My phone is a relic.) They might very well be trying to argue that he was representing the app as part of NMBS, though I think that'll fail pretty quickly, as the branding was totally different.

[maradydd]

Note however that the EU Directive on the Reuse of Public Information applies, and comes down hard and fast on tuinslak's side.

[fanlain]

Is this really worth their time to whine about? If people are using this guy's app it's to get train info to use the trains so how is this a problem for them? It's not like he'd give false train information or hacking into their system to redirect trains or something that's clearly wrong.

If their app sucks and doesn't work well and people seem to be using this other guy's app, they ought to just hire him or buy his app and be done with it.

It doesn't really matter whether something is "right" or "wrong" sometimes but more in how it's dealt with. Even if they think the idea is bad, clearly plenty of Belgians do not and find it actually more useful so why would you fight that?

The cease and desist is just lame. Especially 2 years after he notified them of what he was doing.

[maradydd]

Elsewhere in Lorin Parys' article, he expresses profound surprise that NMBS is threatening prosecution rather than offering the guy a job. NMBS clearly hasn't thought this through. The amount of bad press they've gotten over this in the Belgian media is already sizable and still growing; I want to see them called on this EU-wide and worldwide. Just from a cost-benefit perspective, they would have been far better off hiring him or licensing his code than they will having to fight this out in court.

[darthzeth]

intellectual property law is all about control and limiting people's ability to reuse information. It isn't designed for the consumer.

[fanlain]

My point is that intellectual property control is not necessarily the best decision. I don't care whether it's designed for the consumer or not; like so many other things, its design can also have poor consequences of people just reacting before using their brains.

[jered]

I believe the exact same thing has happened with the NYC Transit Authority and the MBTA. I can't remember how it was resolved, but Google probably does... there were at some point licensing fees involved. This is part of why most cities don't have Google Transit directions.

[maradydd]

Heh. I never did get beyond the proof of concept stage with my Transit Search project; maybe I should pick that up again in all my copious free time...

[kragen]

In the US, government-produced material cannot be copyrighted, as a result of the rationale for the US copyright law; but this is a US innovation. In most other countries, government-produced material is eligible for copyright.

I think this particular US innovation is one that other countries should adopt.