ohio_esri.md

About the Ohio/FOIA case:

It's legal. FOIA means that you can request most data from the goverment for some amount of money. You generally say how much you're willing to pay and don't get hit with any surprises.

The relevant paragraph:

Esri commercially develops and licenses geographic-information systems software. Esri software has numerous copyright registrations, which are protected under federal copyright law. In 2005, the Scioto County Engineer’s Office purchased an “ArcGIS Publisher Single Use Unkeyed License” and “Arcview Single Use Unkeyed License” from Esri. Use of these products by the engineer’s office is subject to a license agreement under which no part of the software, data, or web services may be reproduced or transmitted to third parties without Esri’s express written permission.

And then a follow-up:

{¶ 24} Gambill instead claims that he is not requesting the exempt software; he is requesting the engineer’s electronic database, which includes the raw data used to create tax maps and access aerial photographs. But the engineer’s office cannot separate the requested raw data from the exempt Esri software files

Should the office be able to separate the data from the software? Sure, and their inability to do so suggests incompetence at the least.

But if nothing else this case suggests that strong terms like Esri's, combined with a lack of focus on reasonable exports (let's remember, Data Interoperability costs $2,500) means that exporting data in this way is not what the system is designed for, technically or legally.

And so, yes, the office should have the technical know-how to do this, and they're just being inefficient or don't know how to export data properly. But the system leads them into this and the license instills a fear that sharing data is copyright infringement in some way, however ephemeral.

That said, the office might have also used closed-licensed prepackaged data that came with the Esri software and believes that to have infected their data. The opinion isn't clear enough.

What could improve this?

1. Make the data interoperability extension free. Or, finish esri2open and other alternatives.
2. Make geopackage and other proprietary formats open source
3. Write clear, concise terms that eliminate any doubt that sharing data is legal
4. If any closed-licensed data is included with Esri tools (as it very much is) the legal ramifications of integrating with this data should be incredibly clear, and the ability or inability to extract data from it should be clear.