I have been in contact with EFF Senior Counsel Matt Zimmerman and previously briefed him on the conflict between MTA and StationStops.

Today EFF Activism & Technology Manager Tim Jones laid out the contrasting policies of different city’s transit agencies in their handling of transit data and developers.

Jones uses MTA and Washington’s WMATA as examples of agencies which seek to make intellectual property claims on transit data towards licensing agreements used to generate revenue.

Regarding the conflict between MTA and StationStops, he writes:

NYMTA’s extortionate actions censored a helpful and perfectly legal use of their data. The results have been bad for their reputation and bad for their passengers. Connecticut’s Stamford Advocate put it well: the MTA “should just leave (Schoenfeld) alone and let him make an honest buck by providing a useful service.”

He then contrasts these approaches to San Francisco’s SFMTA and Portland’s Tri-Met, which encourage independent developers to use the data freely to create quality services for their customers.

Tim cites SFMTA Website Manager Timothy Moore’s quote to Streetsblog:

“We’ve put (SFMTA) in front of customers in so many places that we wouldn’t be able to do on our own. We basically can’t envision every beneficial use for this public data and frankly transit agencies in general don’t have the vision. We don’t have the time, we don’t have the resources.”

Read more of Tim’s story at the Electronic Frontier Foundation