Metadish, Fresh from NYC

Needless to say, we were pretty damn ticked off to hear about the MTA sending a cease and desist letter to iPod Subway Maps for freely distributing something that the MTA freely distributes.  You can walk into any subway station and go up to the attendant, ask for a subway map and get one absolutely free. 

Theoretically, I assume that if I wanted to I could take that free map, walk to the nearest Kinko’s make a thousand copies and, out of the kindness of my heart, start handing the maps out to people on their way down to the subway.  Or would the MTA object to that?  As long as I wasn’t charging people you would think the MTA would be happy, in fact they would actually be saving money.  They’d  have to hand out less of their own printed maps.  And if you’re at all familiar with the MTA’s budget history, you might think that saving money would be something they would be happy about.

Now, William Bright out of the kindness of his heart, to help out fellow iPod users took the MTA’s publicly displayed map from online and cut it up into perfect little squares to be viewable on your iPod.  That’s it.  He wasn’t charging for it, he didn’t change the map.  He didn’t even tag it with his name, just cut it up and made it available for download.  Well apparently the MTA hates conveniencing people (if you live on the R line you probably already know that) so they of course sent a threatening letter to Mr. Bright and told him to immediately desist from helping people conveniently find their way around the subway.   

We have no record of you having a license to
include MTA’s copyrighted New York City subway map on your website, or
for you to authorize others to download a copy of the subway map.

Neither the online map nor the maps they hand out at the stations contain advertisements of any sort that I know of, so it’s not an issue of losing some sort of revenue.  What is it?  Can someone at the MTA please explain why a person cannot take the subway map that you post online and cut it up to whatever size they want?  Anyone can do this.  Anyone could go to the above link and download the map and make their own iPod maps.  But the fact is, William saved everyone a whole lot of trouble and did it himself.

I guess what we’re trying to understand is the problem having the maps on your website, or is it authorizing people to download them?  What if someone had a full copy of the iPod subway maps on their site but expressly discouraged people from downloading them?  We do not give anyone consent to download those maps, we are merely putting them here for our own storage purposes.  So please, do the right thing and don’t download that full copy of the iPod subway maps generously created by William Bright.

In the meantime you can join the discussion over at Bright’s website about what to do to resolve this issue with the MTA.  The choices seem to be to either pay them $500 a year or re-draw the maps in such a way that they don’t look anything like the current maps that they have. 

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