California's public-records law received a major boost Monday when the state Supreme Court decided local government must turn over mapping data without charging excessive fees.

The decision (.pdf) concerned an appeal by the Sierra Club, which was charged $375,000 by Orange County for a mapping database of 640,000 land parcels that were in the GIS format, which stands for geographic information system, and can be read by most mapping software.

The case, which took six years to meander through the courts, included a friend-of-the-court brief by Wired and other news outlets who argued that only the cost of the duplication was required to obtain the database.

Orange, one of 58 counties in California, said it housed the mapping data on its own proprietary software, and that it would only release the data if the Sierra Club paid a licensing fee.

The Sierra Club, which sought the data to identify land that might be suitable for conservation projects, refused to pay and sued. The California Supreme Court reversed two lower courts and agreed with the Sierra Club and Wired. The high court ruled the records were public and should be made available "at a cost not to exceed the direct cost of duplication."

Los Angeles County, the state's largest by population, has provided the same data to the Sierra Club for $10.

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