A Greenwich blogger and the MTA are battling over who owns the information contained in train schedules.
MTA press secretary Jeremy Soffin says train schedules are the authority's intellectual property.
Therefore the MTA can sell or license the schedules if someone wants to redistribute or resell them.
"We have different agreements, take Google for instance," Soffin said. "We do have an agreement with them about how the information can be used and how it benefits us and them with its usage.
"In this case there is no agreement, and we have just asked [the blogger] to purchase a license as we would in any case," Soffin said.
But blogger Chris Schoenfeld has been preparing Metro-North schedules for iPhones, and selling them without the transportation authority's permission.
He says he refuses to pay $5,000 to the MTA for his past schedule sales.
"I rearrange the MTA’s data and destroy its copyright and create one of my own, Schoenfeld writes on his blog. "My iPhone application is a unique piece of art, as is the printed Metro-North Schedule."
"However, neither the data in my application nor in the paper MTA schedule is copyrightable by me or Metro-North if someone chooses to take it and make something new with it," Schoenfeld writes.
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