The Greenwich Times has a news article on the town of Greenwich, CT selling compact discs of aerial photos for $70. This followed a court case in which a computer consultant argued that the tax-payer funded municipal GIS should make this and other data available. The town argued against this, citing security concerns. Not all of the requested data was released and there is still some dispute over the price charged for the compact disc. It appears that the legal issues are not yet completely resolved.

I suspect that this will soon become a trend. With easy access to aerial photos and detailed mapping on the Internet, arguments that the public release of municipal data is a threat to security might not fly.