A judge in Orange County has ruled that Orange County is not required to release
its digital mapping data under the California Public Records Act. The county’s
Landbase parcel map system contains the precise boundaries of all taxable
parcels in the county and is known as the Geographic Information System. The
county charges users $1 per parcel for Landbase data with a cost break after the
first 100,000 parcels.
The Sierra Club sought, under the California
Public Records Act (CPRA), low-cost access to the data so that it could use the
information in its conservation campaigns, but the county asked the club to pay
$375,000 for a license to access the system. The Orange County Fire Authority
paid just $75,000 for its copy.
The CPRA limits the price of public
records to “the direct costs of duplication.” The club interpreted this to mean,
in the case of computerized data, the cost of a few blank DVDs. Judge James J.
DiCesare ruled that Landbase is not a public record, but a software and is,
therefore, exempt from the act. “The cost of production in GIS format includes
a software licensing fee that (the Sierra Club) may pay like all other GIS
formatted information requesters pay,” DiCesare wrote in his opinion.
In
a similar case last year, the First Amendment Coalition prevailed in a lawsuit
where the Sixth District Court of Appeals in San Jose ruled that Santa Clara
County had to release under the CPRA its GIS data. At the trial, the county lost
its software exemption and on appeal, lost the act’s “catchall exemptions,”
including national security and copyright.
Orange County
Register, 5/26/10
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