MLS company sues to make

MLS company sues to make property records public An MLS subsidiary sues to make property information public? Are we hearing this right? Yes and yes. WIREdata, a subsidiary of Multiple Listing Service Inc., an MLS company that provides services to several Realtor associations in Wisconsin, had sought electronic property assessment records in 2001 from several municipalities in Wisconsin under open records law. A vendor working with the municipalities' records informed WIREdata that the company "would need to pay a $6,600 one-time fee to program, test and export the data; a 50 cent per parcel charge over and above the ... fee, and a 15 cent per parcel annual update fee. Also, the vendor informed WIREdata that the "costs quoted here assume that you are not reselling the data in mass to another source. This data is meant for you and your subscribers to view. If you want to 'add value' to any part of this data and distribute it in mass to another company, you will need to charge your customer for our fee in addition to your fees for your added value," according to court documents. WIREdata filed a lawsuit to get the data, arguing that the data is public information. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin found that the vendor "owned the copyright" on its technology and "gets to decide whether or not a derivative work, such as requested by (WIREdata), will be produced." The Seventh Circuit Court, though, reversed this decision and found that the process of extracting the raw data WIREdata sought from the vendor's database did not violate copyright law, court records state, and that the information requested by WIREdata should be public information. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals later considered the proper format for the data to be delivered and found that WIREdata should be able to receive the requested information in the same format that it was made available to the municipalities. "The municipalities are the statutory authorities obligated to uphold the letter and spirit of the open records law and they cannot evade their duties by shifting the creation and maintenance of their assessment records to their independent contractors," the Court of Appeals ruled this month. –Glenn Roberts Jr., Inman News