A petition heard this week asks a question that sounds procedural and is not: when a private contractor collects data on a municipality’s behalf, using municipal authority, who owns the result?
Why it matters
The contractor’s position is that the raw collection is its work product and the municipality bought a report, not a dataset. The petitioner’s position is that the authority to collect came from the state, and what the state authorises belongs to the public.
Several open data portals in the country are populated largely by contractor deliverables. If the contractor’s reading holds, a good deal of what is currently published may have been published without the right to publish it.