Losing Access To Public Records p.

By: Mark Fitzgerald

Government trend to charge more and more for its electronic
records is hampering the public's ability to acquire them
OPEN ACCESS TO public records faces a new threat: financially strapped governments from Washington, D.C., to local town halls are discovering that those records are a cash cow.
Computerized public records now can be repackaged into valuable products, and private firms are clamoring to market them.
However, in the process, freedom of information (FoI) advocates say, the public is losing access to records their tax dollars paid for.
Further, some governments eager to cash in on their records are proposing steps that would fundamentally change the public nature of the records altogether, critics say.
"We must stop this growing trend toward commercialization of public records," said Barbara A. Peterson, staff attorney for the Florida Legislature's Joint Committee on Information Technology Resources.
At the FoI Summit in Nashville, Tenn., sponsored recently by the Freedom Forum, Peterson and others in the so-called "access community" said these were some developments of an alarming trend:
? Colorado's state Legislature recently passed a law enabling the state to copyright all public information.
? The U.S. Department of Education has permitted the contractor who used public information to create the widely used education research data base known as ERIC to copyright the data base.
? Dade County, Fla., turned over all its public records to the Florida Power & Light utility, which computerized the data.
After Hurricane Andrew, Peterson said, the utility refused to provide the digitized data base for free for the state Department of Natural Resources cleanup effort.
? Florida's Supreme Court turned over record-keeping of its decisions to Westlaw, the online service of West Publishing Co., the big legal publishing firm.
"The court has access for free ? but I have to pay $100 an hour to Westlaw," said Peterson, an employee of the Florida state Legislature.
Indeed, Peterson describes Florida as something of a pioneer in the commercialization of public information.
"They think that through public records they have found a quick [revenue] fix," she told the FoI Summit.
One of Florida's ideas: Fix the charge for access to information according to the buyer and his plans for the data. As an example, a commercial vendor might pay more than a journalist.
"Generally, I don't see states trying so much to deny access as they are trying to make a buck off the access," Peterson said.
However, the net effect has been to make information more expensive ? and therefore more scarce.
Anne Heanue, associate director of the Washington office of the American Library Association, said several federal agencies have already stopped publishing their proceedings because private database services were covering the decisions.
The result is that libraries ? every bit as financially strapped as any government ? must either pay for the proceedings or do without them.
Ironically, among the private firms most eager to begin commercializing public records are several newspaper companies.
Dayton (Ohio) Daily News editor Max Jennings said his paper is creating a data base to cover all patents issued in the United States. For a fee, other publications will be able to get a list of all patents issued in their state or region.
The newspaper is also looking at repackaging data from the Occupational Safety and Health Agency and other agencies, he said.
"This kind of thing raises all kinds of moral and ethical issues," Jennings said. But the editor is clearly optimistic about the FoI implications of online access to public information.
"I think we are going to get access to records we never had before, if we're aggressive and go after it," he said.nE&P
?