One summer, during my college years, I painted houses for an old hippie I’ll call Jake. Somehow, Jake came up with the idea that he should direct market his painting services to owners of houses that were both old and valuable, as they were likely to be "heritage homes" with wood cladding. So Jake went down to City Hall to get access to property tax records.
The city allowed the public to view microfilmed records for free, or they could jump through a series of bureaucratic hoops and pay thousands of dollars to purchase a database. Jake couldn’t afford the database, and even if he could have, he would have refused to pay for public information on principle. But his direct-marketing plan wouldn’t work if he had to sit at the city’s microfilm reader and transcribe each record one at a time.
