The Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society issues a weekly newsletter with often fascinating content.
The letter of April 30 included a very relevant article, "Government Data: This Data Was Made for You and Me," written by Helen Fu.
The relevance becomes apparent when you learn that Colombia's Graduate School of Journalism has now added a joint degree program to train tech-savvy journalists how to truly delve into online sources for their material, or as Ms. Fu puts it, "It looks like computer assisted reporting is finally going mainstream and moving past its 'hacker journalist' label and identity crisis."
Public Records
One of the richest sources for online data is public records, both Federal and State.
Now, Federal data, according to Section 105 of the Copyright Act makes work of the Federal Government ineligible for copyright protection, but this provision does not apply to State and Local Governments, where local legislation dictates who owns what data and how it can be used.
And this varies from state to state. New York, for instance, has a law on the books that "does not prohibit a state agency from placing restrictions on how a record, if it were copyrighted, could be subsequently distributed." No free-for-all here.
South Carolina views the issue similarly, and allows local government to obtain--and enforce--copyright "to the extent it can be shown that it contains original material, research, and creative compilation." Actually, I'd like to see a definition for creative compilation (there's none to be found line), it smacks a little of the old writer adage: "Stealing one paragraph is plagiarism, stealing more than one is research."
Florida's public record law, on the other hand, "overrides a governmental agency's ability to claim a copyright in the work unless the legislature has expressly authorized a public records exemption."
California sides with Florida, and also requires "unrestricted disclosure" to promote the public record's purpose of "increasing freedom by giving members of the public access to information in the possession of public agencies."
The bottom line here is that Federal data, by all accounts, is open to all, whereas State and Local Government data must be navigated on a state-by-state basis.
In this day and age of transparent government, that's something to be aware of.
