Alert ActiveRain reader and Minnesota abstractor Anita Backlund found an interesting case out of New York State.  It seems that Data Tree, LLC, a division of First American Corp. recently went to court to compel the Suffolk County Clerk's Office to provide to Data Tree with copies of public land records dating from January 1, 1983 to the present, pursuant to the state's Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).  The Clerk's Office denied the January 2004 request on a threefold basis: 1) the records would have to be re-written and re-formatted; 2) the volume of the records involved and the commercial nature of Data Tree's business would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy; and, 3) the records are already available in the Clerk's Office for inspection and/or copying.

The Supreme Court and the Appellate Division rendered summary judgment in favor of the County and denying Data Tree's request.  However, on December 18, 2007, the Court of Appeals reversed, holdng that "questions of fact exist as to whether compliance with such request would require the Clerk to disclose information excluded under the privacy exemption of FOIL and whether the Clerk has the ability to comply with the request in the format sought by Data Tree." Matter of Data Tree, LLC v. Romaine, 9 NY3d 454 (2007).  Furthermore, the Court asserted that Data Tree's commercial motive was irrelevant, since its intent was not to obtain a list of names and addresses for marketing or similar purposes.

While the Court acknowledged that some documents may contain private information, it has remitted the case to the Supreme Court to determine whether the information can be redacted and to resolve the issue of whether compliance will cause an undue burden to the County.  I'm no expert when it comes to computers, but people I've spoken with about this tell me that redaction software technology is no where near reliable enough to handle a project of such magnitude.  For example, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software cannot distinguish a Social Security Number from a Parcel ID. 

Coincidentally, it was Data Tree, LLC which recently announced that it was expanding its nationwide database of recorded property documents to more than four billion documents, according to a report on SourceOfTitle.com.  The company boasts that it adds over 1,200 documents a minute to its database. 

Open-records laws, intended to facilitate transparency in government, were never meant to be used by large corporations as a battering ram to strong-arm their way into our record rooms.  We need to start lobbying our state legislators to close the loopholes in those laws to protect the interests of the private citizens that government serves.