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Anyone with a legal background willing to opine about potential workarounds to this ruling?

Specifically, would a request for “data field labels” (i.e. a column list without any table structure info) likely circumvent the exemption?

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I think that would run afoul of

> The one big limitation of Illinois FOIA (with FOIA laws everywhere, really) is that you can’t use them to compel public bodies to create new records.

Unless for some reason they already had a list of columns without table structure.

(Not that I claim to have a legal background)

Yes but what if we come up with a directive that every FOIA request must be logged into a DB. Therefore every request is automatically invalid as it requires we create a record!

/s

I had that thought too, but my naive rebuttal would be that the column data already exists by default in any standard RDBMS as information_schema.columns. No new record creation required.

Yes, but that requires someone to execute a query on a database and package it as a report?

Not a lawyer, but why not use opensource as an example? Many successful public e-commerce websites have public schemas and aren't all hacked.

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