| Please don't sue me |
[Apr. 15th, 2007|02:58 pm] |
Dear Hon. Peter Van Loan, Minister for Democratic Reform,
I'm emailing you to make sure our government doesn't sue me.
Well, there's more. I ask that you to open up more civic data in Canada, including postal code data. This would benefit taxpayers by avoiding duplication in government departments. It would also avoid the disgraceful practice of misleading some Canadians as to who their elected representative is.
Let's start with the legal question. Is it illegal for me to copy a list of members of parliament from parliament's website? I made a copy after hearing a couple different (non-partisan) advocacy organizations had staffers copy and paste the database from web pages into their excel databases. You can find my list here:
http://lokobo.com:3000/mps
To import it into excel, you can obtain it as CSV:
http://lokobo.com:3000/mps.csv
Several people have told me that this constitutes copyright infringement, although it seems to me a straightforward list of facts.
Once I had completed this list, I was asked for a function that retrieves a member of parliament for a postal code. (More precisely, something that returns a list of possible electoral districts ids for a postal code.) You can see that function here:
http://lokobo.com:3000/
Is that illegal? Again, straightforward facts. I'm not even redistributing a database or making any efforts to build an exhaustive one.
Advocacy organizations across the ideological spectrum use similar tools. Egale, Preserve Marriage, CLC, United Steel Workers, Automotive Industries Association's Consumer (Right to Repair campaign), Micah Challenge, Make Poverty History, CAHPERD, The True Voice, CNIB, all exhort supporters to "Contact your MP".
Some groups link to the parliament's website, others copy the information. The richest buy data from Statistics Canada. If we care about democracy, this information should be freely available to all. A government that spends millions encouraging citizens to vote in media campaigns can surely forgo a few thousands in licensing fees to make it easier for citizens to express concerns on policy issues.
Besides the cost to democracy, there are a couple other points worth considering.
-Elections Canada is not a customer of this product. They also buy a file from Canada Post, a crown corporation, duplicating the costs of development.
-The elections.ca website results seem less accurate than those on the parliament's website (which I hope was obtained from StatsCan rather than duplicated).
You can verify this for yourself by searching for 'H1T4C6' on
http://www.elections.ca/scripts/pss/FindED.aspx
and comparing it to:
http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/people/house/PostalCode.asp?Language=E&txtPostalCode=H1T4C6
Is it one or one of five possible MP's?
Making this data freely available in an open format is a great way to ensure citizens are given accurate information, to increase participation in our democratic process and reduce error-prone bureaucratic duplication.
I have copied some of your colleagues, hoping they will support you in changing policy on this matter before the next election is called. When every political party has a function to find their candidate by postal code, advocacy organizations should be entitled to the same.
Some of my colleagues want sites where a citizen could input their postal code to find all candidates in their riding, along with their programmes and other communications. It would be nice if we could do that without the threat of litigation.
I look forward to hearing from you.
----
Note: that parl.gc.ca link broke. It's now
http://www2.parl.gc.ca/Parlinfo/Compilations/HouseOfCommons/MemberByPostalCode.aspx?Language=E&Menu=HOC&PostalCode=H1T4C6
Dozens of advocacy groups in Canada had their links to the parliament website broken by this change. Sigh. |
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| Canadian MP Data, take 2 |
[Mar. 25th, 2007|05:22 pm] |
Yesterday I released a new feature on my Canadian MP data web service: MP lookup by postal code. It got some coverage on David Akin's blog and provoked some discussion on the civic access email list.
I'll be quite happy when this data is made freely available by government. Until then, I intend to run this web service for all those that need it at no cost and without usage restrictions.
Now if only transit data were as easy to obtain as MP data... |
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| Canadian MP data |
[Mar. 18th, 2007|07:32 pm] |
I wonder if the government is going to sue me for copyright infringement. As they say on the website I got the information from:The material on this site is covered by the provisions of the Copyright Act and related regulations and international agreements. Such provisions serve to identify the information source and, in specific instances, to prohibit reproduction of materials without written permission.
The visitor should be aware that some of the material found on this site might be subject to copyright held by third parties.
It is the sole responsibility of the visitor to determine the copyright of the content and to obtain all necessary permissions. If publishing the list of MPs with their contact information is somehow illegal, we're definitely not living in a democracy. I didn't ask permission because I don't think I should have to.
Make Poverty History had a campaign asking people to call their MP. Sadly, the email did not include the MP's phone number - even though they know who the MP is. There was no public database they knew of that had a list of MPs with their corresponding data. Through civicaccess.ca I heard of other organizations and similar cases, so I decided I would compile the information. That database now exists, and is in the public domain (as long as I don't sued!):
http://lokobo.com:3000/mps
download a CSV version at http://lokobo.com:3000/mps.csv
The source code for retrieving the information and the website is also public domain:
http://rubyforge.org/projects/mp-ca-scraper/
(Geeks don't copy and paste information from websites into spreadsheets. Oh, no! We take twice the time, and use programming tools. And publish the whole thing as open source.)
(Comments deleted because of a deluge of spam. Project is offline, code is still up for anyone that wants to take it over. Let me know in private if you do, I'll update this post) |
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