Re: [PLUG] Help with Lawsuit

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

On Thu, May 01, 2003 at 02:29:10PM -0400, Edmund Goppelt wrote:
> Gabriel, thank you for your comments.  I think you may not have been
> aware of some pertinent facts.  According to the contract with the
> vendor, the BRT's web site runs on SQL2000 and Windows 2000 Server
> ASP, not DB2.

Okay, fine, so it's in Microsoft's propietary format, not IBM's. So
what? Point still stands; they've paid for development to present an
interface through which you can retrieve this information. You're
asking them to present you with a different interface to the same
data.

> Since I assume you've seen web sites running off tape stores before,
> can you point out a couple to me?

Never seen that, and it'd be a totally stupid thing to do...

> What kind of response time would you expect on a web site running off
> a tape store?  I ask because the response time on the BRT web site is
> on the order of a couple seconds for a database of 565,000 records.

... because there's no way you'd get that kind of response time,
obviously. :^>

> "...a public record shall be accessible for inspection and duplication
> by a request in accordance with this act.  A public record shall be
> provided to a requester in the medium requested if the public record
> exists in that medium; otherwise, it shall be provided in the medium
> in which it exists."  65 P.S. Section 66.2(a) of the Right to Know Act.

It's a bit ambiguous, but I'm not too sure you're right about this.
You're requesting that they provide you with a full dump of just
these several field of their table. That isn't the medium in which
it exists; it exists buried in a database (which may very well have
other information, including things that may NOT qualify under the
Right to Know Act).

There might be very good reasons they can't just give you copies of
the database files, and they'll argue that they are already
providing this in the medium in which it exists, which is pretty
damn close to the medium you've requested.

Is there some problem with just hammering their web site? They'll
probably decide to lock you out eventually to save bandwidth, at
which point you've *really* got something to sue over...

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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