The official tax assessor of Kanawha County in West Virginia, Phyllis Gatson, has filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction to block Seneca Technologies from publishing tax maps for the entire state of West Virginia on the Internet. Citing a state law which prohibits individuals from copying and redistributing tax maps without the county tax assessor's permission, one that also enables tax assessors to sell paper copies of the maps for approximately $8 each, Gatson asserts that Seneca's actions constitute copyright infringement and have caused her to suffer financial damages.

Seneca, a document indexing and data management company, began its quest to obtain tax maps for all of West Virginia last year by sending a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the state tax department, which has digital copies of all of the tax maps for internal use. When the state declined to fulfill the FOIA request and insisted that Seneca pay $8 for each of the 20,936 TIF images (a total of $167,488), the company filed a lawsuit to force the agency to comply with its obligations under the FOIA. The Judge ruled in favor of Seneca, noting that the state law requiring payment applied only to paper maps and not digital copies. The tax department was forced to provide the entire collection of maps for a single payment of $20 to compensate it for the total reproduction costs.

After obtaining the maps, Seneca then made them available for free on the Internet through its own web site so that they could be accessed by the general public. Seneca plans to use its document indexing technologies to create an elaborate search system that makes it easy for users to correlate information from the tax maps with other data stored in Seneca's databases. Gatson, an individual county tax assessor, responded to Seneca's plans by filing a lawsuit in an effort to win an injunction that would force Seneca to take down the TIF images.

Seneca is represented by activist group Public Citizen, which recently filed a memorandum in opposition to the injunction (PDF) which argues that publication of the maps does not cause financial damage to Gatson because anyone can now obtain the maps from the state at the cost of $20, and prohibiting publication of the maps would violate the First Amendment. The filing also describes numerous pragmatic and ethical considerations that justify publication of the maps—describing how the information is of value to diverse groups ranging from environmentalists to mineral extraction companies—and notes that broad public access to the information increases transparency and accountability in the tax assessment process.

"When combined with text of other files that contain the entire state's property assessment data, including the owner's name, address, parcel identification number, assessed value, and other pertinent information, the maps provide a new level of transparency to the assessment process, thus enabling citizens to monitor the adequacy of plaintiff's performance of her public duties," the filing says. "For example, does an influential person or company, such as a particular public official or campaign contributor, have land that is assessed at significantly lower value than bordering properties? Can any differences in assessment be explained by differing size of parcel, topographical configuration, and the like?"

The filing also notes that the state law barring reproduction and distribution of tax maps without written permission from county tax assessors isn't valid because federal copyright law includes a preemption provision that precludes state copyright laws. The filing notes that the state law banning free redistribution of tax maps acts like a copyright law while failing to provide any of the counterbalances found in federal copyright law, such as limited duration. And even if the maps were protected by copyright, the filing contends, Seneca's actions would still likely fall within the realm of fair use.

It is worth noting that several states already broadly make tax maps available online for free. The state of Oregon, for instance, offers a highly sophisticated interactive tax map interface on its ORMAP web site.

Seneca's conflict with a county tax assessor over Internet publication of public records reflects some of the problems that society will face as more government information transitions from static print into digital formats. Seneca's efforts to integrate the information into a more cohesive database that would provide significant value to citizens of West Virginia have been assaulted every step of the way by anachronistic laws and misguided government officials. It is a sad day when a company attempting to provide a public service at its own expense is barred from doing so by outdated and legally dubious state laws.

Further reading