NYC Gov't Sends Legal Threat to Artist for Telling People How to Use Traffic Cams to Take Selfies
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Few things seem to push government officials to become officious faster than the mild irritation of people making a slight mockery of government machinery. In the grand scheme of things, the scofflawishness is almost imperceptible. But it's the scoffing part that bothers these officious entities the most. And that is almost always greeted with a pettiness inversely proportionate to the original acts that put these particularly irritating burrs under the government's saddle.
And so it is here, in the case of artist Morry Kolman, which has the possibility of turning into The State vs. Morry Kolman. As Samantha Cole explains for 404 Media, Kolman took publicly available information and added even more publicly available information to turn New York City's traffic cameras into ad hoc selfie stations.
The locations of the cameras are already known and people can access the feeds through the NYC Dept. of Transportation site. The only thing Kolman added was instructions on how to use the cameras to capture photos on demand of anyone within range of the camera.
This apparently bothered the NYC DOT so much it decided to send Kolman a half-assed cease-and-desist letter[.]
[...] Kolman has responded appropriately. He acquired a 25-foot window washing pole, which he used to take a photo of the C&D letter sent by the city, as well as to hoist a mirror to camera-level to obtain a traffic cam selfie" - both of which were featured in a recent Miami art exhibition.
[...] But it's no longer just a New York City problem. Kolman has provided code that enables other users to upload/link to traffic cam location data, which means this is starting to spread across the nation.
Minneapolis, Minnesota has entered the chat. So have sizable portions of the upper east coast and the state of Georgia
The NYC government is still free to criminally charge selfie-takers for, I don't know... aggravated jaywalking? But it doesn't have a legal leg to stand on when it comes to threatening people for providing the public with access to data the city and its DOT already have made publicly accessible. That this particular use of that data may be ill-advised doesn't make it a violation of the DOT site's terms of use. The only thing the city has done here is provide national advertising for a site that had flown well under the radar right up until the NYC government decided to make an issue of it.
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