Filed under: iPod Family
iPod subway maps under fire
iPod users in a score of cities from Los Angeles to Tokyo have been enjoying iPod subway maps downloaded for free from William Bright's iPodSubwayMaps.com. That site is now under fire from transit authorities in New York City and San Francisco, who have issued cease and desist letters for alleged copyright infringement. After receiving letters from legal counsel for New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority and website manager for San Francisco's BART, Bright removed the disputed maps, but he didn't stop there. He's designing his own versions of the maps and posting those for free download. Bright posted his version of the San Francisco BART map on Friday. His NYC Subway System map is reportedly in progress. The cease and desist letters are available to read on Bright's site. More details at Wired News. Update: The iPodSubwayMaps site went off-line shortly after this post. iPodSubwayMaps.com now redirects you to a page that says: "This account has been suspended." So we get another lesson in power in America.
Further update: iPodSubwayMaps.com is back online. See Bill Bright's comment below. Bill -- thanks for letting us know it was just a bandwidth problem.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Andrew Kaufmann said 4:01PM on 9-26-2005
I don't get it. Why would you not want your users to be able to access your information in more ways?
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NL said 4:10PM on 9-26-2005
Everyone's following the RIAA's lead. This has gotten ridiculous.
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Big Ben said 4:47PM on 9-26-2005
The server in the url of that suspended page is called "freedom."
I guess not so much, though, if you piss off someone with money.
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David said 4:51PM on 9-26-2005
We have subways in L.A.? :)
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Brady J. Frey said 5:20PM on 9-26-2005
They dropped it? Maybe because of bandwidth... hopefull because of bandwidth. What a crock. He does a service, only to be blocked, and now BART is going to offer it's own server. This should not be controlled by one organization, since it is a government entity. I'm thinking it's lawsuit time...
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LD said 5:34PM on 9-26-2005
It's too bad so many stupid people run so many companies and organizations.
The guys is simply doing something no one else is...and he's not charging users for the service. Yet some wahoo uppity-up suit realized he looked like a jackass because one guy was doing the work of his entire company so he has the place shut down.
As they say in my neck of the woods, "B" as in B, "S" as in S.
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Wheels said 5:57PM on 9-26-2005
God, more self-important ingrates.
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brian said 6:01PM on 9-26-2005
"Public Transportation"
Who paid for the maps to be produced in the first place?
Exactly.
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Berko said 6:05PM on 9-26-2005
Seems Bright's host has suspended his account in light of all of this. What a shame. I was planning to download some of those maps for my trip to Chicago next month! Dammit! Well, I guess it's back to doing it the old fashioned way.
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Andrew said 6:23PM on 9-26-2005
What are you guys talking about? Not only is the site functional and responding, but about three days ago he posted redrawn versions of all the maps in question. Actually his versions are pretty nice, too!
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Andrew said 6:23PM on 9-26-2005
What are you guys talking about? Not only is the site functional and responding, but about three days ago he posted redrawn versions of all the maps in question. Actually his versions are pretty nice, too!
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William Bright said 6:25PM on 9-26-2005
Hey all.
Bill here (from iPodSubwayMaps.com)
It turns out that the site suspended my account due to the overwhelming traffic I was receiving. This site is currently hosted on my personal web host, and isn't set up to receive the astounding volume of traffic that I've recently received from Wirednews.com, news.com, gawker, and of course, here. :) However, keep clicking and enjoying the maps! If the site goes down again I'll just have to upgrade to a more expensive service...
They can't keep this designer down!
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LD said 6:25PM on 9-26-2005
brian raises a very interesting point, by its very nature, he can use those maps. He's not making a profit, the service he provides is free, he's part of the public, providing public information to the public. The public owns those, not a private corporation.
Anyway, the site is back online.
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teece said 6:27PM on 9-26-2005
When a publicly funded governmental entity publishes documents, they should be required by law to release those documents into the public domain, free of copyright, or with a non-mod Creative Commons at most. The idea that I can't freely distribute information we all bought and paid for is totally ridiculous.
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Adam Jacob Muller said 8:40PM on 9-26-2005
The real problem is that, at least here in the northeast with the MTA, they are not actually a public agency in the same legal sense that the people who fix potholes in the road are. The MTA here operates as a seperate legal entity that is designed to be not-for-profit (though this does not preclude them from making large amounts of money -- they can bank it and save for a rainy day).
Many other orgs operate in this way. Amtrack, The Port Authority, NJ Transit are all entities of the same type.
Now, i'm not a lawyer and I really don't know the implications of this but the fact is that the people from the MTA should be rewarding Bill, offering to pay his hosting costs, linking to his site and probably paying him for his service to them.
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iGuy Adventures said 5:20PM on 9-27-2005
some guy is upset, because this guy made something good all by himself that this big public company should have already been doing.
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Kevin B said 10:25AM on 10-04-2005
There are files for the NYC Subay Map here:
http://www.thenycsubwaymap.com/NYCSubwayMap.zip
Grab them ASAP and share them with others (host them, file share, bit torrent, etc).
Good luck.
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