Timetable App Developer Gets Nastygram From Transit Sydney 378
mikesd81 writes "ZDNet Australia writes that NSW state corporation RailCorp has threatened a Sydney software developer with legal action if he fails to withdraw a train timetable application that is currently the second-most-popular application in its category in Apple's App Store. Alvin Singh created Transit Sydney after he began teaching himself how to program in Cocoa Mobile. Within days of its Feb 18 release, Singh received a cease and desist notice from Rail Corporation NSW, the government body that administers Sydney's CityRail network. The email states: 'I advise that copyright in all CityRail timetables is owned by RailCorp. ... Any use of these timetables in a manner which breaches copyright by a third party can only occur through the grant of a suitable licence by RailCorp.'"
"As a government body, RailCorp information is protected by Crown copyright, a contentious provision in copyright law that has recently been used to block attempts to access information on the location of Victoria's bushfires and even seemingly innocuous information as the locations of public toilets. 'RailCorp's primary concern here is that our customers receive accurate, up-to-date timetable information,' RailCorp spokesperson Paul Rea explained. 'This includes details of service interruptions, special event services, track work and other changes. ... At this stage, it is not possible for RailCorp to grant third-party developers access to our internal passenger information systems. As such, any third-party CityRail timetable application would contain inaccuracies and have the potential to mislead our customers.'"
Re:No Case Under US Law (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No Case Under US Law (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately the relevant part of Australian intellectual property law is a bit of a relic from the 'olden days' and actually doesn't bother to distinguish between a creative work, and merely publishing a fact. So things like telephone directory data and train timetables CAN in fact be considered copyrighted here.
Yes it's utterly ridiculous. The Australian Law Reform Commission is looking at this as a matter of priority in its review of Australian IP law, and it's likely to get changed within the next 5-10 years. But for now, that's the state of affairs.
Disclaimer: IAAL.
Re:Facts can't be copyrighted. (Score:5, Informative)
You may wish to compare copyright schemes - In particular, the EU & AU recognise the so-called "sweat of the brow" right extant in databases, which a timetable would qualify under. Times of football matches also seem to qualify.
The controlling law in Australia is Desktop Marketing Systems Pty Ltd [âoeDtMSâ] v Telstra Corporation Limited [2002] FCAFC 112. At paras 253 & 254:
253 It was not their alphabetical arrangement or their designation as headings that attracted copyright protection to the compilation of headings constituting the Headings Books. Rather, it was the labour of building up the collection (of headings). Desktop appropriated the benefit of all or most of that labour.
254 Accordingly, by parity of reasoning with my reasons for concluding above that Desktop reproduced a substantial part of the White Pages Directories and a substantial part of the Yellow Pages Directories, it also reproduced a substantial part of the Headings Books, and so infringed Telstra's copyright in those Books.
So, under Australian law, you can copyright a compilation of facts.
Cheers,
Michael
Re:No Case Under US Law (Score:5, Informative)
Well I'm qualified as one ... but I don't currently practice law. I'm a university lecturer ... specifically, Information Technology Law and IP Law. So saying 'IAAL' is slightly naughty of me since I'm not actually representing clients et al. at this point, I just have the necessary qualifications.
Re:tip of the iceberg (Score:3, Informative)
I couldn't agree more, and if it's software, it should be open source.
Meanwhile... (Score:1, Informative)
across the other side of the country, Transperth timetables for bus, train and ferries are integrated into Google Maps Mobile. Just sayin'
Re:Database rights (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know anything about Australian copyright law, but under US law you cannot copyright a fact. A train timetable would certainly qualify. This might be one area where we get things right.
In Australia (and I think elsewhere) there is such a thing as a "database right". A rough example would be the phone book. It is a collection of facts: people's names and their phone numbers. However, there is a significant investment in collecting these facts, and so the particular *set of facts* (ie, the database) has an associated database right. So, unless the authors of the app independently collected their own data on when trains pass particular stations (eg, by sitting in every station with a watch -- unlikely), they presumably were using RailCorps' "database" (timetable).
This is currently been tested in the high court, at least as far as TV Electronic Program Guides. See http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/18/2037216&from=rss [slashdot.org] for the story.
Re:That's not good (Score:3, Informative)
I strongly agree, remembering that I once upon a time stayed a whole day on a bridge in Nicosia because there was a comparatively clean public toilet underneath
CC.
Re:No Case Under US Law (Score:5, Informative)
It also depends on how the information is retrieved.
For example, some 15 years ago in The Netherlands a company wanted to release a phone book to compete with the monopoly fixed line provider's phone book. This to sell advertisements and so of course. Now to get the telephone numbers, they took the phone book to China, and hired a bunch of Chinese for cheap to manually copy the numbers from paper into a computer, and then printed it. The monopolist of course didn't believe that, and a law suit followed.
The point was: reading and typing the numbers is legal, as the information could not be copyrighted. However directly copying the phone book (e.g. by using a photocopier) would be illegal.
This of course is not Australian law, but I just want to point out that even though the information (telephone numbers, sports results, TV schedules, transport time tables) may not be copyrighted, a certain representation of it may suddenly be copyrighted.
The train company may argue that it is illegal to draw the information from their web site (e.g. screen scraping), even though it is not legal for someone to walk down to the station, look at the published tables, type the information into their PDA, and publish is.
As another poster in this thread points out there is also an issue with TV listings: these are normally drawn directly from a TV channel's Internet site, and that may cause copyright problems. However if someone would gather the information from public sources (printed listings, the newspaper, whatever) then it may be a different matter.
Of course I think it is silly to have these tables copyrighted, and even silly from the train company to prevent this information to be known by as many people as possible (the more people know about when a train runs, the more are likely to actually take it), without knowing the details of how this information is retrieved and how the Australian copyright laws deal with this kind of information we can not say whether they are legally right or not. And whether they are morally right or not, that is a totally different discussion.
Re:Posting Yesterday's Train Schedule (Score:3, Informative)
But I don't want to catch the train yesteday, I want to catch todays train.
In fact, public transport in Sydney is a joke. Most buses for me stop right at the edge of town, a mile from the center. Each trip costs a ticket, you don't get 2 hours of transport included. And the bus which takes me into town, the only one that actually goes to the center of town, doesn't stop for me on the way back. It keeps going for 20 minutes, to the middle of nowhere, as I discovered at 2am one day. There are also special buses were you can't but a ticket on them, so if you don't have one by 10pm, you are screwed.
On top of that every fucker drives, so the traffic is horrendous.
Recheck that headline. (Score:5, Informative)
The headline says he got a nastygram from "Transit Sydney".
According to the summary that is, you know, right below it, "Transit Sydney" is the application, not the company. The company is "RailCorp".
Getting a nastygram from an application you developed does occasionally occur (fuck those runtime exceptions), but not in the sense this article implies.
Re:Factual train times (Score:3, Informative)
Crushing societal pressure to conform?
Human intervention?
Re:No Case Under US Law (Score:4, Informative)
The US murder rate is about 5.9 per 100,000. It hasn't been at 9 per 100,000 in a number of years. The UK's is about 1.4 per 100,000. Japan's is about 0.5 per 100,000.
Re:No Case Under US Law (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Database rights (Score:4, Informative)
more or less clever than detecting traffic speeds (and thus jams) by tracking cellphone signals from the stations - as is already used / in trials?
Knowing that -a- train passed by point X at time Y is great... knowing -which- train that is, however, is a lot more important.
In addition, that only gives you the realtime information... if I want to travel tomorrow, how's the situation -right now- going to help me? I'd still want to be able to look at the scheduled time table - no matter how far off that may be from tomorrow's actual situation - so I can at least plan ahead. I can then use the realtime information -tomorrow- to see if the train's actually going to be on time or whether I can stay a bit longer and say my goodbyes to my daughter 5, 10 minutes later.
The NSW Premier has intervened (Score:4, Informative)
His Twitter page [twitter.com] says "I've asked Minister Campbell to speak to RailCorp. They will meet with the app developers to negotiate how to use the info accurately"
Re:No Case Under US Law (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly to millisecond? Microsecond? Maybe exactly to a Plank time?
For most purposes +-2 minutes interval is 'exact'.
Re:No Case Under US Law (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Factual train times (Score:3, Informative)
If I were the developer, I'd consider shifting all of the numbers the app provides by an hour or a day or a minute or something--maybe randomly +/- a few minutes. If the table is no longer factual and makes no claim to be, the copyright claim may be somewhat weakened--or not. Worth looking into at any rate.
This is what "fake books" do for sheet music, the tunes sound very very familiar, but they are just a little different.
In this particular instance (fake books), I think the spirit of the law has been raped and left in the gutter - there should still be protection against this, just like Lamborghini replicars, etc. On the other hand, copyright law needs every kick in the teeth it can get, things really should go public domain after 30 years or so.
Re:Idling corporations and working people (Score:2, Informative)
This is actually the case in Sweden and presumably other european countries following the Germanic tradition of law (as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon one). In cases hard to judge the preparatory work presented to the parliament on the passing of the law, is considered.
Sorry that some old chap (not wearing a silly wig if it's a consolation) got the credit for the good idea.
Re:No Case Under US Law (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I'm aware, Japanese trains have to be within ~2 minutes of the schedule or the passengers get a partial refund.
Sadly, the same is not true in Sydney, where a few years back Railcorp defined "on time" to be anything up to five minutes after the scheduled arrival/departure time.
Naturally, this dramatically improved their "on time" performance statistics, which they then used to justify a fare increase.
With that said, from a technical perspective, their poor performance is apparently due to incompetence, not malice (at least according to my wife, who used to work for an engineering firm with a lot of Railcorp projects).
Re:No Case Under US Law (Score:2, Informative)
It's easy to be glib, but this was actually a major issue in Japan for a long time... it wasn't until they passed a law that fined the deceased's family that the number of suicides via subway started to drop.
Re:Sounds like the UK.. (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, the amtrak is so limited in the number of places it goes that few americans have actually used it to go somewhere. The only time I ever used it on a regular basis was when I lived in California and would head down to San Francisco for the weekend -- the traffic was so bad and the parking in SF so horrendous that it was much easier to do that and take the BART or the MUNI everywhere.
I live in Atlanta now and the main "train station" for this metropolis of 5.6 million people is about the size of just one of the minor stops for a city in europe, there's not even a comparison to one of the hub stations like grand central or union station. It still blows my mind whenever I see it.
Re:Why isn't this the standard? (Score:2, Informative)
Chicago is doing that for their buses: http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/home.jsp [ctabustracker.com]
even with mobile applications (where you need the information the most).
Re:No Case Under US Law (Score:3, Informative)
You realize there is no way to fix that without re-engineering the city's traffic light system, right? The buses leave the stations every 6 minutes, mostly. The bunching up on the road is an emergent behavior of crappy city road network planning, and high traffic density.