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Re: [PLUG] Help with Lawsuit
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On Thu, May 01, 2003 at 02:54:39PM -0400, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
> 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).
I agree the Law is ambiguous on this point. We intend to argue that
this provision (65 P.S. Section 66.2(a)) must be construed liberally
and that the City should provide the records in a particular format if
they have the means to produce the records in that format. For
example, if the BRT has a CD burner--and they do--they should provide
the records on CD.
> 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.
In the six months I've been asking for this information, I have yet to
hear a good reason. My own opinion is that they wanted to be the
first to offer this info. on their web site and avoid the embarassment
of me doing it first. This happened to them back in January, 2002,
and I think BRT Chair Glancey has never been the same since.
> 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...
They'd look mighty silly if they did lock me out, since this is what
their lawyer recommended I do. It would also be illegal. The Right
to Know Act specifically forbids "a limitation on the number of public
records which may be requested or made available for inspection or
duplication." See 65 P.S. 66 Section 8(c)(1).
Given how easy it is to produce a SQL dump, the City's suggestion
seems both petty and harmful to the public. I'm concerned that if I
follow their suggestion that their web site would probably crash or
become unavailable to the public for long periods of time. At six
queries a second, it would take me an entire day to download all
440,000 properties.
Why go through all this rigamarole? Why not just take the five
minutes required to do a SQL dump and let me ftp the data from the
City's ftp site?
--
Ed Goppelt
http://www.hallwatch.org
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