[wongarsu]

> And maybe they want the public information but in an easy-to-manage format

Would there be any legal requirement to satisfy such a request? Why should a business expend resources to do something the police could do on their own?

[danso]

Various freedom of information laws acknowledge the importance of information being provided to the requester in a machine readable format, when that information originates from such a system. I'm not arguing that this applies to police asking a private entity for information, just that the courts/regulators are not ignorant about the difference between machine-readable data and "oh just do a search and copy-paste it from the website".

http://www.justice.gov/oip/blog/foia-post-2009-annual-foia-r...

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/08/25/freedom-of-inf...

[ckuehl]

As an interesting example, Lavabit tried handing over their RSA private keys in an illegible printed font:

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/10/04/cheeky-lavabit-d...

[Lawtonfogle]

>Various freedom of information laws acknowledge the importance of information being provided to the requester in a machine readable format,

Such as an XML(ish) markup with accompanying code to describe presentation?

[tomjen3]

That's not much, I can easily come up with a format that is computer readable that will require you to write a parser for.