1. The state does the assessments but the local counties and Baltimore City are the ones who benefit since they collect majority of the property tax. This presents an inherent problem since the state does not want to fund operations which are not bringing in income, as illustrated by the complaints in the article about not sufficient staffing. Even though the counties and the city reimburse the state, apparently it is not enough.

2. The city is happy to leave the current system alone since accurate assessments are more likely to cost city money overall, implying that most properties are really over assessed. This dove tails rather nicely with what the Washington Post wrote recently about the impending implosion of local assessments, most of which are based on several years back and the height of the real estate market (hat tip: Adam Meister). Worse, according to the numbers quoted by the Post from Baltimore officials, revenue from property tax is scheduled to decline by about $25 million per year for the next few years. That means that several years from now the city will be looking at a $100-150 million hole.

3. The most galling thing in the article is the fact that the head of the state’s department of assessments had the gall to say that assessors don’t have time to visit properties! There are numerous public and private resources, free and low cost, which allow you to see imagery of real estate. Plus the city has droves of housing inspectors giving out sanitation fines, all armed with cameras.  In the words of the Facebook generation, “dude, you never heard of Google Maps?”

P.S. Here is a Google Maps street view of the property Baltimore Sun wrote about:

View Larger Map

I am writing to you today as a resident of the 41st district to oppose the proposed bill titled “Budget Reconciliation and Financing Act of 2012″. Specifically, there are three things in this bill that I would like to draw attention to: increase in income taxes for high earners, taxation of digital goods and taxation of out of state Internet companies with affiliate relationships in the state.

1. Increase in income tax.

a. The O’Malley administration seeks to lower the maximum allowed exemption amounts and deductions for earners over $100,000, effectively raising their income tax rates. As past history has shown, raising taxes on higher end earners does not work. Specifically, the administration has tried imposing a surcharge on earners of over $1 million several years ago, which not only did not bring in more money but caused the state to lose revenue because people moved out of state (as per this WSJ article). Raising taxes on the high earners over $100,000 may have the same effect of driving people to live elsewhere.

b. Furthermore, people earning larger amounts of money generally do not report them via their personal returns. For example, the WSJ estimates around 2.86 million people in the US are millionaires in 2010, yet according to the IRS statistics for 2009 only about 286,000 personal returns with income over 1 million were processed. That means that only about 10% of high income earners actually report that via their personal returns. The rest goes through investments, trusts, corporations, foundations, etc. With higher income taxes in lower brackets, the same may happen with income being routed away from personal returns and into a variety of financial instruments, which may not be even taxable within the state. Anyone making over $100,000 can probably afford a creative CPA who can figure out ways to get around the higher taxes, and at the worse can afford to move out of state somewhere more friendly tax-wise.

c. Last, our economy is still doing pretty badly. Why raise taxes in a bad economy – are we trying to make people more poor on purpose?

2. Taxation of digital goods.

Another set of provisions that are concerning is taxation of digital goods. This provision will only serve to drive digital based business out of state. While I sympathize with local brick and mortar businesses that feel that online competition selling digital goods is not fair, taxation is not the main issue here. Rather, entire industries and business models are being upended by move to the digital realm and adding taxation to this will only serve to drive digital businesses that we need out of state and delay the inevitable changes. Instead of taxation, we should look at ways to modernize the tax system in the digital age, while providing a pathway for existing business to modernize and move online.

Furthermore, most of the larger companies that sell digital goods are not even based in the state and would not be affected. Examples are Amazon, Apple, the Wall Street Journal, etc. Ironically, the ones hit the hardest would be newspapers like our local Baltimore Sun that only recently begun to sell subscriptions.

Last, these provisions will create an unintended consequence of taxation of services – an approach that has been rejected in the past by the citizens and the General Assembly. For example, the proposed bill would tax “fabrication, printing, or production of tangible personal property OR A DIGITAL PRODUCT by special order”. By the currently language of the law it seems to include graphics design services for blogs, music creation and mixing, book writing and editing, and even writing articles for hire like newspapers. All of these are “created by special order” and are “digital products”. It sounds eerily similar to the proposed software services tax from several years ago. In today’s world where books, music and news are almost always produced and exchanged digitally, this would potentially impact harmfully many small business and freelancers that work in the music, publishing and news industries. It would create a strange exemption where something on tangible media would not be taxed which would make a book editor liable for taxes for emailing a manuscript to a client but not for burning it to a CD and mailing that.

3. Sales tax on Internet sellers with affiliate relationships.

Another provision that deserves criticism is trying to get around the nexus requirement established by the Supreme Court in Quill vs. ND by making affiliate relationships tie a vendor to the state. Every single state that has tried this law ended up losing money because out of state companies simply terminate affiliate relationships, resulting in thousands of lost jobs and closed businesses. Instead of doing this constitutionally questionable maneuver why not do what the Supreme Court itself said would be a solution – simplify the state sales tax system by joining the growing Multi state sales tax compact and lobbying Congress to change the law. This solution would enable the state to collect taxes not just from online businesses, but also from catalog companies and other similar out of state sellers.

Furthermore, there are online companies already based on other states that do act as affiliates for merchants and then cut deals with in state residences in a way that bypasses the proposed law.

4. Other ideas.

Instead of raising taxes, and stifling the rapidly developing digital world, how about cutting costs? For example, state employees currently get benefits no longer offered in the private sector. Why not bring those into parity? Another example, is going after the Homestead credit and those who abuse it. Baltimore City has recently done that after a Baltimore Sun story and is schedule to get millions. Another idea is having a state wide Inspector General office just like Baltimore City, which has already recovered millions for the city.

Additionally, another disgusting practice that has to stop is moving money from funds designated for specific things to the general fund. The proposed bill takes money collected from the gas tax and transfers it to the general fund. Instead of doing that, how about spending that money on fixing roads? Another example, is the money from slots which is supposed to go towards education. Instead, we currently have places like Baltimore City looking to borrow over 1.2 billion dollars to pay for school repairs while we, the citizens, were promised loads of money from slots for exactly that.

In closing, I would like to add that many of the younger citizens of the state like myself are much more familiar with technology that lawmakers and would be happy to educate your members. Perhaps, another idea would be to get some technology briefings to members of the General Assembly explaining a lot of these issues, and I am sure many technology savvy citizens and constituents would be happy to help.

Respectfully,
Yakov Shafranovich

Baltimore officials plan to ask the General Assembly to pass legislation to align the city’s municipal elections with the federal cycle, the city’s chief lobbyist said Monday. The change would “save the City money and engage more citizens in our elections,” according to a memo the lobbying team handed out to City Council members at a luncheon meeting Monday.

If the proposal goes through, the first one will take place in 2016, which is the next Presidential election and the current officials just elected in 2011 would server 5 years instead of the usual 4. Of course a lot of work is needed before this happens including both state and local legislation, and probably a charter amendment and a referendum. But is nice to see that there are still people in the city government concerned about finances and election turnout.

The spreadsheet below is based on the data provided by OpenBaltimore as of January 2011. I added percentage columns and a count of in state, non city resident employees. My analysis appears after the document:

There are several surprising things in this document:

• About 44% /  6,338 of city employees do not live in the city
• About 5% / 743 city employees do not live in the state of Maryland!
• Top six agencies by highest percentage of out of state employees are: Orphan’s Court (5 / 41%), Fire Academy Recruits (11 / 18 %), Mayors Office (16 / 16%), Comptroller’s Office (1 / 11 %), the Fire Department (184 / 11%) and Police Department (327 / 9%).
• By sheer numbers, the highest six agencies with out of state employees are: Police Department (327), Fire Department (184), Health Department (47), Solid Waste/DPW (21), Water/DPW (19), and the Mayors Office (16).
• Top six agencies with out of city, in state employees by percentage are: Wage Commissioner (3 / 100%), Audits /  Comptroller (23 / 63%), Police Department (2,155 / 62%), Finance / Account and Payroll (26 / 55%), Fire Department (902 / 53 %) and State’s Attorney’s Office (191 / 51 %).
• Top six agencies with out of city, in state employees by sheer numbers are: Police Department (2,155 / 62%), Fire Department (902 / 53 %), Water/DPW (450 / 29%), Health Dept (263 / 25%), Highways / Transportation (211 / 25 %), and State’s Attorney’s Office (191 / 51 %).
• Top six agencies with the lowest percentage of city resident employees are: Wage Commissioner (0 / 0%),  Police Department (977 / 28%), Fire Academy Recruits (20 / 33%), Comptroller / Audits (12 / 33%), Fire Department (616 / 36%) and Finance / Accounting and Payroll (20 / 42 %).

TAKE HOME CARS

For example, currently Baltimore City’s Sheriff’s office is tagging vehicles belonging to the city’s public housing authority in order to sell them at an auction to pay for legal judgements. As pointed out by Adam Meister on his blog, some of the vehicles they are tagging are personal “take home” vehicles belonging to high level officials within the housing authority. This report dating back from 2009 says that at least 247 city employees have take home vehicle which they often taken on interstate trips, personal and paid for by the city (here is some more coverage from the Sun breaking down the numbers).

For a lot of people living the Baltimore-Washington Metro area, commuting to work is a fact of life. Many jobs are shifting away from downtown areas in major cities to places like Bethesda, Columbia, Fort Meade, Aberdeen, Annapolis Junction, etc. The public transportation system has not kept up with these changes and as the result lots of people commute to work, every day with their own private cars, public transportation or combination of there-of. And unlike public transportation and parking costs which may sometimes be tax-deductible via “cafeteria plans”, simply driving to work is not. and GUESS WHAT – we, private citizens, working at private companies or even federal contractors or agencies DO NOT GET FREE CARS!!! Why should city employees get them?

Another problem with city owned cars is that the expense is open ended. It is unclear if there are controls in place regarding the cost of gas, maintenance, personal vs. business use etc. It is also unclear if there are also no controls on whether new cars are bought or slightly used, leased, etc.

As an alternative, it would be trivial to calculate how much it costs to commute by using IRS’s standard formula of $0.55/mile and simply provide that money to the employees. That is what big companies do with some of the traveling employees, but only the ones that actually need to travel for their jobs, not commuting!

ILLEGAL TAX BREAKS

Another area which has been an area city officials have failed in is tax breaks. The current Mayor got caught when the media found out her husband and herself were collecting two Homestead Tax credits, while a married couple is only allowed one. At least they paid that one back.

However, the most egregious example of illegal tax breaks is the Conaway family. The father of the family, Frank M. Conaway, Sr., is the City’s Clerk of Circuit Court. The mother is Mary W. Conaway, the City’s Register of Wills. The daughter, Belinda Conaway / Washington, was a city councilwoman. And the son, Frank M. Conaway Jr., is a state delegate.

Belinda Conaway recently lost her re-election bid for city council after Adam Meister, a local blogger, found out that she apparently lived outside the city and collected the Homestead Tax credit there, which still has not been paid back. She sued the blogger for defamation for 21 million, the suit got dismissed but not before blowing the entire story wide open causing her defeat. The tax credit money has not been paid back.

Her father, then got in trouble when the Baltimore Sun found  in August 2011 that he collected a homestead credit on his rental property. However, not until December of 2011 when the Baltimore Sun ran an extensive series of stories on how much money the city loses in these credits, did the city’s finance department finally focused on this break and forced Frank to pay back over $3,000 in illegal tax breaks.

However, as per the August 2011 story in the Sun, Frank and Mary Conaway actually have a bigger problem. As the Mayor herself found out, you cannot claim the Homestead Credit on more than one property if you are a married couple. Both Frank and Mary claim credits on two different properties, totaling several thousand dollars going back several years. And none of that money has been paid back.

The thing that gets me the most is not issue of tax credits per se – it is really the total lack of apology to the city and its citizens. The entire mindset seems to be that unless they get caught, they are entitled to these tax breaks, and when they do get caught there are no apologies. Why can’t they simply apologize instead of grumbling about not knowing where to send the money?

PENSIONS

While on the topic of tax breaks and Belinda Conaway, it is worth to note that a lot of city employees get pensions. While I have no problems with granting pensions for physically demanding and dangerous jobs such as police and fire departments, why do disgraced former mayors and city council members get pensions – it is not like they can’t find jobs. Mayor Sheila Dixon who resigned because of a perjury charge is getting an $83,000 / year pension and she has a lobbying job also. Why?

What about people like secretaries, office workers, etc.? In the private industry pensions are being eliminated and I don’t see why the government can’t match that.

Over the course of our trip I kept seeing all sort of strange and interesting things Baltimore is famous for, but the nagging overall feeling I kept getting is that while the city overall has tried to attract people to visit, there were a lot of small “finishing touches” that just weren’t there, and made the overall experience good, but not great. It felt like there is a small step that remains to be taken and no one thought about taking it.

Some of the things that concerned me:

• At the Light Rail station, no instructions were provided as to how to use the Charm Card (I happened to have a WMATA SmarTrip card left over from a trip to DC which works the same way). I eventually found the instructions online and even then, it turns out that you cannot use one card to pay for two adults. For a visiting tourist, that is a major issue. To make the whole thing even funnier, they have instructions inside the light rail car itself, at which point it is too late to get a ticket.
• While there is handicap access, there aren’t any details on strollers.
• At the Light Rail stations, inside the cars and online, there is no mention of the Charm City Circulator - a free bus downtown. We ended up walking about 7 blocks to the Inner Harbor, and would not have done that even we knew the bus was available. While I understand that the CCC is a city project and Light Rail is state operated, but a little cooperation would go a long way.
• The signage pointing to the Inner Harbor on the street corners is ambiguous - we weren’t sure we were heading in the right direction until we got very close to the Harbor.
• We tried to use the skywalk at the convention center because my kids wanted to see it and went to use the handicap elevator to go up with a stroller. The elevator worked and opened, but lo and behold there were two homeless guys sleeping inside! We decided it was best not to disturb them and have them nap in their cozy place. For a tourist that could be somewhat jarring.
• In the Harbor itself, there is very little signage regarding the public transportation available near by aside from generic signs pointing how blocks it is to the closest station in which direction. I remember seeing downtown maps in NYC when visiting.
• On the way back, we took a skywalk across Pratt street. While the elevator on the Harbor side worked perfectly without any sleeping people in it, the other side had no working elevators, so we ended up going down three floors of parking ramps to get the floor.
• We wanted to hitch a ride on the CCC on the way back, but the mobile app did not have prediction times for the bus, the station pole did not have time estimates on it and the regular website claimed it would be another 10 minutes. So we started walking only to get passed by a bus 2 minutes later. If you go out of your way to make sure the buses are tracked, you should also make sure that the website for tracking works! We eventually caught another one half way through.
• On the way back, we took a Light Rail car only to discover later on that it was going to the wrong destination (Light Rail has three lines). It would have been much easier if when the car came, it was clearly indicated and announced that this was the wrong car.

The instructions for requesting a ballot appear on the state’s Election Board website. There is a PDF form to print out and return, but interestingly you can submit the form via email or fax, and you can request the ballot being sent to you via email. They even allow the ballot to be sent to a different mailing address but it was the email option that interested me the most. You only need the voter’s name, address, date of birth and party affiliation to request a ballot (you do have to sign). To request the ballot I did just that by getting the PDF form and returning the signed version via email.

About 2 days later I got an email pointing me to the Maryland voter registration status website, where people can check on their voting registration status. To access the site, you need to know the voter’s name, date of birth and zip code. Once logged in, there is a link to the absentee ballot which requires knowing a tracking number which was included in the original email. Once in, there are several PDFs containing the ballot, a prefilled oath form to be signed by the voter and PDF containing the envelope information. The tracking number is included on the oath and the envelope BUT not the ballot itself which has no marks identifying the voter.

What was a little concerning is the ballot itself – it referenced two charter amendment questions, the full text of which I could not find online. I eventually found both of them on the Baltimore City Council’s legaslative system but it took a lot of digging (see this, this, this and this). Question A proposes letting the city borrow money to fix the school system as a non-lapsing (permanent) fund which can be funded by donations or ordinance of estimates assignment. It is interesting to note that the city’s Department of Finance opposes this amendment and the Department of Law raised some important legal issues as to whether the amendment itself is even legal. It is also interesting to note a somewhat weird power point presentation from the school system. All of these documents are available here. The second question lowers the age requirement for council members to 18 from 21, and requires people to be registered voters in the city, as opposed to be registered voters in general.

The ballot and oath must be returned to the Board of Election via postal mail. Once counted, supposedly it will show up in the same online system allowing the voter to check that their vote was counted – something conventional voting does not allow (although people are trying).

The most worrisome aspect of the whole process is security – once you know the basic registration information for a voter, you can then request a ballot online and mail it in. What would make it more secure is that the voter tracking number should be sent via postal mail instead of email to the registered address or at the least a post card saying that “someone requested a ballot for you”. While the Board of Elections may match signatures, it would be trivial to get copies of registration records and signatures just like the Board of Elections plans to do with petitions against illegal immigrant in-state tuition several months ago.

It sounds like the lawsuit was a classic SLAPP suit – preventing Adam Meister from publishing about her or talking until the election was over. It is a good thing that it was not successful.

One thing that both Belinda Conaway and Adam Meister agree on is that she did in fact sign at least four legal documents on a piece of real estate outside Baltimore City and claimed it as her residence at least four times. She may argue it is her mother’s house, or that it was a mistake, but the documents do exist and can be easily looked at (BaltiLeaks got most of them).

What is interesting is that the lawsuit is probably causing Adam Meister not to be able to talk at all about the matter, going straight into election season. Ms. Conaway is up for re-election and the primary is only a few months away. This time, she even has a challenger in her district (Nick Mosby). All she has to do is drag the lawsuit past the September primary and then it won’t matter anymore. This may explain why the co-defendent, Examiner.com, never got served – they are not the target. Given that Ms. Conaway’s father is the clerk of court, delayed the lawsuit maybe not be too hard.

UPDATE: Looks like a hearing has been scheduled on August 1st, 2011.

However, reading the legal paperwork yields several more nuggets that are pretty interesting:

• The Maryland SLAPP law is being invoked to expedite the lawsuit and dismiss it early. It goes without saying that First Amendment rights are involved as well.
• While the lawsuit was filed on April 11th, 2011, Adam Meister was not served until 3 weeks later on May 1st. His co-defendants have still not been served.
• One cannot claim defamation against something based on their own words. In this case, the councilwoman signed an affidavit in conjunction with a real estate transaction, which is the same as her own words.
• There have been other cases where defamation claims have been dismissed based on third party information, but here it is even better since this is her own words.
• Someone cannot say something and than retract it later and sue for defamation based on the original statement.

The entire set of legal records makes a fascinating read, and I would encourage everyone to go through it.

On a related note, a local whisteblower site, BaltiLeaks, has been posting copies of all kids of real estate documents where Ms. Conaway, the councilwoman, has signed that she is a resident of Baltimore County, not the city. See here, here, here, here and here.

While the councilwoman claims it was a mistake signing those documents, BaltiLeaks summarize it the best: “If Conaway committed an ‘oversight’ in signing these documents, they did it four different times.”. This is besides the fact that someone who makes her living writing and passing laws, signs legal documents without reading them?

As mentioned before, all of my ECB documents are here: http://goo.gl/kdGZe.

Now comes word of a $21 million lawsuit by a Baltimore City Councilwoman Belinda Conaway against a blogger at the Examiner, Adam Meister because she “can’t sleep at night”. The blogger alleged that the councilwoman did not reside in the city as required by law and as proof showed state records where the councilwoman claimed a house outside the city as her primary residence. He also mentioned that her entire extended family including her father, her brother and her brother’s children and hers all live in one single family house in the city. This was followed up by a local TV station, the Citypaper and even the Baltimore Sun chipped down and analyzed some water bills. Overall, at no time did the councilwoman actually provide a real reason or defense as to why the state records show her primary residence outside the city. Only after the lawsuit was filed, did she try to give some sort of explanation.

She will be running to re-election next year, so perhaps this little story percolating in the background did not seem to bode well for her campaign. Plus it helps when your daddy is the clerk of Circuit Court, and is friends with all of the judges. So she went ahead and filed a $21 million lawsuit against the blogger for libel and defamation. An important point is that her lawyer, Thomas Maronick, is not exactly known to be defamation and libel expert; according to his own website he deals with criminal defense, medical malpractice, DUI, etc. but no where does it mention defamation or libel. He may have his own radio show but it does not appear that he is a defamation expert like this guy.

Now in the US, it is hard to prove libel and defamation, especially for a public figure. So this maybe just a harrasment suit, better known as SLAPP or “Strategic lawsuit against public participation”. As perWikipedia:

A strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) is a lawsuit that is intended to censor, intimidate and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition. The typical SLAPP plaintiff does not normally expect to win the lawsuit. The plaintiff’s goals are accomplished if the defendant succumbs to fear, intimidation, mounting legal costs or simple exhaustion and abandons the criticism. A SLAPP may also intimidate others from participating in the debate.

Additionally, Maryland has a special “anti-SLAPP” law specifically designed against lawsuits like this.

Now that the story went national with the AP carrying it, the best response maybe this comment from the Baltimore Sun story:

Councilwoman Conaway had two reasonable options:
#1 Ignore the whole matter and hope it goes away. The sun didn’t even bother to cover it until she filed suit.
#2 Admit the technical violation, pay the back tax, and move on with her life.
Instead she does this??

UPDATE: All of the ECB related documents I have collected are now available here: http://goo.gl/kdGZe.

UPDATE #2: All of the ECB related documents I have collected are now available here: http://goo.gl/kdGZe

UPDATE: Adam Meister points out that one of the judges, Gary Brooks, is former mayor Sheila Dixon’s next door neighbour. BGW points out as I already knew that the other judge, Ms. Welch is married to the chief judge of the Circuit Court of Baltimore city, which hears appeals from the ECB.

You can download the entire file here, or read below:

For those of you not local to Baltimore, the Environmental Control Board informally known as “trash court” is an agency of the city government that does administrative hearings on trash, health, safety and related violations. My experience with them about 2 years ago reminded me of Kafka’s Trial more than American democracy. I have been to an administrative hearing once before in NYC, before the NYC’s traffic court and it was a very different experience. Here in Baltimore, they basically rubber stamp the citations, occasionally reducing some.

In any case, below is a letter that I have been working on for quite some time which I recently sent to the city government. You can download it here as a PDF file or read below:

A better plan for transparency

Instead of televising city meetings on cable, publish all relevant information online

By Yakov Shafranovich; 5:35 p.m. EST, November 17, 2010

Baltimore City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young recently proposed new legislation to achieve greater transparency in the operations of city government. His proposal would broadcast the meetings of several of most powerful city boards over cable television. City officials balked at the cost of the proposal, and rightfully so. The Internet can achieve even greater transparency, while being much cheaper and easier to use.

It should be noted that two existing state laws impose several important transparency requirements on city government: the Maryland Open Meetings Act and the Maryland Public Information Act. The Open Meetings Act requires that all governmental and quasi-governmental bodies falling under the law hold open meetings which all citizens can attend freely. It also requires that notice be given prior to each meeting, letting citizens know that it will take place, and that minutes of each meeting be recorded in a timely fashion. The second law, the Public Information Act allows citizens to request access to any government records. A key component of this law is that government cannot charge excessive fees for access to or photocopies of materials available under this law.

This means that every board and agency in the city that holds meetings must let us, the citizens, know about it in advance, and that written minutes must be created after each meeting. Additionally, anything ranging from the minutes and agenda of the powerful Board of Estimates down to how much the City Council spends on bottled water and its lunch menu, must be easily accessible to citizens. These two laws do not cover just the several boards mentioned in Mr. Young’s proposal but extend to most city boards and agencies, and are already on the books today.

Mr. Young’s proposes that meetings of several key city boards be televised on cable TV is well-intentioned, but it would be far more transparent, cheaper and broader to publish meeting notices and minutes of all city boards and agencies on the Internet. In addition, written records can be searched and perused much easier than video, whether live or recorded, and posting written records in lieu of video will not require the city to spend funds on new recording equipment as proposed by Mr. Young. Existing city law already mandates that the Department of Legislative Reference should collect the meeting notices and minutes of various boards and commissions. The City Council should require that this information, most of which is already in electronic form, be posted on the Internet for ease of access by all citizens.

Furthermore, an existing city law requires that fees for photocopies of public records shall be set at 15 cents per page citywide. Multiple city agencies, including the Board of Estimates, are possibly out of compliance with this law, and by extension the state law as well by charging excessive fees for photocopies. For example, the Board of Estimates currently charges $1 per page for copies of any of its records, when the state agency average is about 25 cents per page.

The mayor and city government should make sure that all city agencies comply with the Maryland Public Information Act in a uniform fashion and make sure that fees and procedures of access are uniform across the entire government. Furthermore, certain important city records, such as financial and ethics disclosure forms, can be published on the Internet as well. They are accessible under the existing law anyway; why not take a step further and make them public to all?

We have already seen great strides toward transparency by the city in many key areas. For example, the Board of Zoning Appeals publishes an online docket with appeals documents attached. The Department of Housing has an online database of code violations with actual photographs. The Department of Finance publishes a database listing payments from the city to various contractors, a property tax database, and a parking ticket database. The City Council itself has a very good online system for its agenda, minutes and proposed legislation.

It is a shame when it is easier to find out information about meetings of community associations and corporations than important city boards such as the Ethics Board. Mr. Young’s proposal seems like a step backward. Instead, Mr. Young and the rest of the City Council should examine alternatives that would utilize the Internet and achieve compliance with existing laws.

Yakov Shafranovich is a software developer living in Northwest Baltimore.

The new guidelines are as follows – I highlighted the changes:

The main change is the first guideline – it used to say that only non-commercial use is allows. Now it has been replaced by two new guidelines: no hosting, and no reprints including helping people reprint.

An interesting wrinkle about the new hosting restriction is that the Internet Archive is currently hosting about 537,000 PDFs of public domain books from Google Book Search. Under the old rules, non-commercial hosting was ok. What is the story under the new guidelines?

The new no reprint guideline seems to be directed towards services like my own PublicDomainReprints.org with the second part “help other people buy and sell them” perhaps directed towards POD providers like Lightning Source and BookSurge, and e-commerce sites like Lulu and Amazon that assist in the process. It remains to be seen what the story is under the new rules and I am evaluating options as far as my service is concerned.

One thing to consider – are these retroactive? Can a company put out public domain material with a notice in the material itself, and then go ahead and change the terms?

Of course, the elephant in the room is that these books are in public domain and thus have no copyrights. Without significant creative change it would not be possible to re-assert copyrights over the public domain scans (sweat of the brow has been struct down back in 1992). Whatever terms apply are being pushed via contracts and not the tradition route of copyright licensing. This may or may not similar to what the OCLC has been recently doing by trying to enforce contract rules on stuff that cannot be copyrighted. Can a contract override federal copyright law, placing a public domain book under someone else’s legal power?

It appears that at least some public domain content within Google is already hidden behind protection. The recent addition of magazine to Google Book Search brought along some magazines which have been published before 1923, placing those issues into public domain. If you run a search for magazines published before 1923, quite a few come up. But none of them have PDF downloads and all of them say they are being displayed with permission of some magazine publisher. It seems that the publisher provided them under contract with restrictions, thus forcing Google to carry over the restrictions. But what if the same magazine is scanned at a library? Will Google allow the second version to appear with full PDF download?

One other side effect of this is that if the content in question is not copyrighted, than in theory the DMCA restriction on reversing DRM should not apply since it only applies to copyrighted material. It would still be illegal since hacking into someone else’s website is forbidden and no one should try it. But in theory, does reversing DRM as codified in DMCA apply for public domain content?

Another interesting point is that these seem to be voluntary guidelines. The legal terms of Google’s site and any of the Book search site never state these terms, and both inside the book and in the FAQ they are cauched in a language that ” we do ask that you follow some basic guidelines regarding their use”. Is “we do ask” a legal request? IANAL, but perhaps not – may be they are simply there to scare people off?

Lots of questions, and a few answers.

P.S. And there is the small matter of the Google / AuthorGuild settlement which is going to have hearings in front of a judge. A settlement that someone can object to.

Read How to Fix the Google Book Search Settlement to learn how to deal with the POD web host reseller issue.

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{
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	}
	return(newString);
}

You can test it here.

The federal government plans to begin collecting the full names and birth dates of air travelers this summer in its latest effort to screen passengers for possible links to terrorism. In a few weeks, the Transportation Security Administration will notify airlines, travel agents and online reservation systems that they will be required to ask travelers for their legal names and birth dates when booking domestic flights. Travelers will be encouraged — but not required — to give the personal information. Under the current system, only a last name and first initial are needed to reserve a flight. Passengers who don’t comply with the request will dramatically increase their chances of being stopped at airports for questioning or pat-downs, TSA Assistant Administrator Justin Oberman said. That’s because their partial names are more likely to register a “hit” on terrorist watch lists.

Now I have a stupid question – given that the information is being provided by passengers voluntary and no one verifies it, what stops a terrorist from lying? Is any terrorist actually stupid enough to travel under their real name?

I send in a card with three four telephone numbers (home, cell and fax), my full name and two addresses (school and home). There was also a $5 fee. I got back four reports: one Telephone Product Search, one Identity Product Search and two Property Product Searches.

Starting with the the Telephone product search, for my school address and name the resulting phone number was someone else’s. For my home address and name the resulting phone number was in fact correct. For reverse phone number searches for all three numbers no results were found while my own searches online were able to yield at least one number.

For the Idenfity search the reported data was four years old without my driver license, incorrect month of birth and no gender. The property searches got nothing.

While on one hand I am appalled by the low quality of information present on the other hand I am kind of happy that most of my information has been kept out of their hands. But then again, with information like this how do you expect to fight terrorism?