“I wonder if the CPD legal team reviewed these [Agency Licensing terms]…”

IL FOIA prohibits govt agencies from imposing reuse restrictions on public documents. That is, if something is FOIA-able then, once released, it is in public domain, and may be used for literally any purpose whatsoever, up to & including making money, which is after all the MSM model for doing FOIAs.

In fact, a govt agency isn’t supposed to even ask you what you want to do with the documents you request under FOIA, except that if your purpose is commercial the agency may deny your request for waiver of copying fees.

A govt agency can use their website to honor their obligations under FOIA, but if they do they may not slap reuse restrictions on the posted data any more than they can restrict reuse of a released paper doc. So for example what Burke is doing with the Finance committee documents is flat-out wrong-headed.

BUT nothing in IL FOIA prohibits the RECIPIENT of govt documents from prohibiting reuse. For example, it is typical for a MSM outfit to claim copyright when they post or print the the results of a FOIA or a report summarizing information garnered thru FOIA.

So, what CPD did with EB & Nixle demonstrates a profound understanding of IL FOIA – by intermediating through a privileged 3rd party, a govt agency is able to give the impression of being champions of transparency, while imposing reuse restrictions, and without even admitting that the information is public/FOIA-able! If CPD itself had offered alerts directly from their own website, they would have helped lay the groundwork for a claim that they have to offer them to everyone without reuse restriction. It’s really quite clever what they are doing. We should expect more of these privileged 3rd party deals as we ratchet up pressure for transparency.

“…the Agency Licensing terms are clear.” I read Nixle’s terms to prohibit reuse of the data when scraped from Nixle’s website, but not necessarily to claim an an exclusive right to the underlying CPD alert data. In other words, Nixle’s terms tell any clever open gov oriented users of Nixle “go get yer own data from CPD, good luck with that, chump.”

“I wonder if the CPD legal team reviewed these [Agency Licensing terms]…”
I’m sure they did and I beleive CPD deliberately shopped for a diseemination partner who would maintain a strangle hold on reuse, just like they did with EB. CPD wants talking points about hi tech & openness but they don’t want to lose control.

CPD fears Mon AM QB-ing of their resource allocation decisions, and so does not want civilians to slice & dice crime stats, for example, comparing & contrasting areas, districts, and beats and years, quarters, and months.

“I … would love to see how they respond to a FOIA request for all alerts sent to Nixle.com.”
At first blush things like EB & Nixle give the impression openness w.r.t. CPD is a solved problem, let’s move on. But we have a lot of work do to even with CPD. A FOIA such as you mentioned would serve to encourage CPD to further tackle their open data policies, and in particular challenge their misguided attempts to control reuse. In general if a gov agencies gives to one they have to give to all. But again FOIA does not come into play until someone dashes off a letter.

EB’s roots are screen scraping as chicagocrime.org, but u years they have depended on a custom feed from CPD that is not available to anyone else.

“EveryBlock isn’t a government agency nor their delegate.”

Neither EB and Nixle are govt agencies, but both are delegate agency to the extent they operate under agreement with CPD to provide data dissemination services, and both agreements include severe reuse restrictions. EB & Nixle are not so different as you may think and CPD data is not so open as you may think.