| If such a national law were passed with funding guaranteed for open publication of records, I would endorse your point of view. No such funding exists, and municipalities are regularly denied tax increases by their voters for any reason — much less public records publication that would often embarrass and humiliate those same voters. So in essence you're asking them to cut public services and staffing in order to give hundreds of dollars of IT costs a month to for-profit businesses who can't be bothered to pay some small fraction of their revenue for the costs of delivering those records. It is our civic responsibility to republish those records for free as citizens. Doing so for profit at the expense of citizens is unethical. If OP republishes all records received in a freely-downloadable, unrestricted form, then I would happily help them fix their scrapers. They, of course, do not. |