“You can have it if you agree not to show it to anyone else, and if we think you will pay a lot of money for it, expect a big bill.”

That’s the gist of the Milwaukee County Automated Mapping and Land Information System’s (MCAMLIS) policy with its data.

MCAMLIS is a committee of the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission (SEWRPC) that dates back to 1990 as a public-private partnership created to produce and maintain modernized geographic data and information systems (cadastral mapping, planimetric and topographic mapping, and addressing) for Southeastern Wisconsin.

MCAMLIS’s members include regional governmental entities and private utilities which are now We Energies (formerly Wisconsin Gas Company and Wisconsin Electric Power Company), and AT&T (formerly SBC Ameritech and Wisconsin Bell). The data held by MCAMLIS (in a variety of changing forms) has been held under two distinct copyrights and has been available for purchase by other parties. [MCAMLIS Data Requisition and Distribution Guidelines]

While MCAMLIS claims not to be engaged in a for-profit enterprise, it is clearly interested in tightly restricting sales and access to its data.

From 1993 onward, MCAMLIS differentiated its printed and digital records with two copyrights. Its steering committee held copyright over the printed materials, and its private utility members held the digital copyright. Recently MCAMLIS claims to have perceived some problem with this arrangement and the County will assume sole ownership of the copyrighted data. [Milwaukee County mapping site using copyrighted data.]

Whether this data may be copyrighted or held under any proprietary license at all is a question I’d like to pose for further inquiry.

Both copyrights pertain to the same underlying data in two different media forms; the underlying data is in large part public information created by governmental, tax-funded entities, such as the City of Milwaukee. The City’s Department of Public Works [DPW Annual Report for 2002] and Information Technology Management Department have provided data to MCAMLIS over the years. Currently ITMD has a contract to provide data and data services to MCAMLIS on an ongoing basis, and the County funds one ITMD staff position for that purpose.

Selling It

Revenue from data sales by either the utilities or the steering committee to commercial entities is supposed to be returned to MCAMLIS, and “noncommercial” entities are allowed to purchase the data at the cost to assemble and deliver it. This cost should be negligible, but it is priced by map quarter sections or the time it takes to produce custom maps and data sets, which can add up.

Fortunately for some customers, discounts are possible.

When the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute and the Land Information and Computer Graphics Facility at UW-Madison requisitioned “91 quarter-sections of digital cadastral maps and 134 quarter-sections of planimetric and topographic mapping” from MCAMLIS about a decade ago, they reported that the MCAMLIS pricing structure should have resulted in a bill of $6,785 for the “digital files.” However, they were only billed $3,400 “to cover the cost of the cadastral and planimetric/topographic mapping.” The university researchers’ report on this and similar data purchases from other Wisconsin governmental entities shows the range of pricing and licensing they encountered, from free to rather expensive and copyrighted to non-copyrighted.

The most interesting and non-intuitive aspect of MCAMLIS’s distribution policy is that “noncommercial” is defined not by reference to a business model but to whether the purchasing entity will expose the data to other people, the extent of the data they will use, and how often they will use it: “Noncommercial use is defined as the periodic internal use of selected digital mapping materials–not the entire digital mapping file–by private firms and individuals.”

In other words, frequent use of a complete data set, and/or use of it in any public-facing way would be considered “commercial.” Commercial use has to be purchased, and these purchases are typically required to cover the complete MCAMLIS database, whose duplication and distribution costs must be even lower than specific sub-sets of the total data.

Currently the total data set costs $520,000, and purchase requests are considered case by case where a key concern seems to be regulating how the data is further distributed by those who buy it. MCAMLIS has a keen interest not in sharing its data, but in sharing it with selected entities who will pay at least several thousand dollars for it and keep it to themselves.

How does distribution work out in practice? Who gets what data, and how much do they pay? Some of this can be discerned online from MCAMLIS records and organizations that have acquired MCAMLIS data, as with the UW-Madison division mentioned above. The 2007 minutes for MCAMLIS also include 6 pages of itemized data requests for that year, but the revenue to MCAMLIS represented by these requests is not clear.

The New, Semi-Public County Mapping Application

Recently MCAMLIS unveiled “Milwaukee County Interactive Mapping,” a web-based application for displaying its data, some of which is open to the public, while other data is restricted to MCAMLIS members and partners. The web interface allows data exporting with .CSV and .XLS output options for tabular data–i.e., a generic format many software applications can read (such as spreadsheets) and the proprietary but widely used Microsoft Excel format. Some map coordinate data can be dumped from the Interactive Mapping interface in these formats, but for the most part the raw geodata is not available.

A Growing County Data Business

MCAMLIS has received income from another data source, again in both print and digital forms, via the County Register of Deeds. A portion of the fees on property transactions handled by the Register of Deeds go to MCAMLIS. The Register of Deeds itself is a seller of online access to deed records through a private third-party, while digitization and other services have been handled internally and through contractors, one of which noted in January 2008 that it had collaborated with the County and a Title company to create the first working system to electronically transmit and record deeds “by a register of deeds office within the state,” which “signals the start of a significant transition to digital document recording throughout the state.”

As digital data becomes ever more dominant in government and elsewhere, law and policy bound in the assumptions of print culture may take a while to catch up, along with public awareness of the public interest stakes involved.

Let the Sun Shine In

In a 2005 guest editorial at the Journal Sentinel, Jim Rowen describes how MCAMLIS, with a chairman who was previously SEWRPC’s executive director and consultant (Kurt Bauer), passed funds to SEWRPC for a controversial $1 Million suburban water study that SEWRPC wanted Milwaukee County to fund, which was naturally resisted. Though it had nothing to do with MCAMLIS, the water study was ultimately funded by MCAMLIS. Rowen observes,

If public funds can be moved around on such important issues in so little daylight, especially to support a controversial regional plan, then regional cooperation needs a hefty infusion of openness and accountability to be credible, especially in the City of Milwaukee.

If Waukesha County and SEWRPC continue to use or move westward Milwaukee’s resources - whether land, water or money - Milwaukee will logically and wisely retain those resources for its urban interests and residents while looking for common ground and cooperative partners to Chicago and points south.

In a similar vein, the public should take a closer interest in transparency and accountability with regard to unelected bodies like MCAMLIS and SEWRPC–especially as they are engaged in moving around public funds for their own purposes and generating revenue from public data by keeping it rather private. The City of Milwaukee should also look to its own data resources that are in the mix–which MCAMLIS is selling. Is it legally in the clear for anyone to copyright this data? Should such data be tightly restricted, with an eye toward stopping the sharing and dissemination of it out of concern that someone might make money from it? My opinion on that is “no,” but if the ultimate answer is “yes” to both questions, then I wonder what Milwaukee is getting from MCAMLIS in return for its sharing, other than a contract for services and a GIS analyst, a total value of less than $150,000.