ARLINGTON, Va.—Yesterday, the Institute for Justice (IJ) filed a petition for certiorari with the United States Supreme Court on behalf of Ryan Crownholm, an Army veteran and entrepreneur in Los Angeles. The petition raises an important First Amendment question of whether providing useful information is protected speech.

Ryan owns a mapping business called MySitePlan.com. His business is simple: Customers pay him to create informal maps of their property from preexisting information and images. Ryan uses publicly available information from the internet—from computer mapping systems like GIS (Geographic Information System), Google Maps, and other programs with satellite imagery—to make a digital drawing that shows the customer’s lot lines and the buildings, driveways, fences, and other fixtures on the property. 

Customers all around the country—and the world—use these maps for varying reasons. Hotels and resorts use them as guides to assist guests around a property. Farmers’ markets use them to show vendors where to put up their booths. Most commonly, homeowners and contractors pursuing construction projects use them as a visual aid to show local-government building-permit staff where a proposed new swimming pool or shed will be built on their property. These building departments know these drawings are not from surveyors and accept them anyway. Indeed, these building departments teach non-surveyors how to make site plans.

Ryan operated MySitePlan.com for nearly ten years, creating more than 40,000 site plan drawings in that time. Its reviews were overwhelmingly positive.

But despite a stellar track record over years of hard work, the California Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists wanted Ryan shut down. In the Board’s view, Ryan’s basic maps were unlicensed “land surveying.” On Dec. 28, 2021, officials sent Ryan a “citation order” via email demanding that he “cease and desist from violating” California’s land surveying law and pay a fine of $1,000. 

Ryan never claimed that his maps were surveys, and no one (other than the Board) ever expressed confusion that they were. In fact, MySitePlan.com is headed by a disclaimer (in bolded, capital letters): “This is not a legal survey, nor is it intended to be or replace one.” Ryan was simply depicting information, already available to any member of the public, as a map.

Making maps illegal isn’t just absurd—it’s unconstitutional. The First Amendment’s protection for the freedom of speech isn’t limited to political advocacy or expressions of personal opinion. Using, creating and disseminating information, the Supreme Court has held, is also speech within the meaning of the First Amendment. And that is all Ryan’s maps do.

So Ryan, with the help of IJ, sued the Board.

But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals claimed that Ryan isn’t engaging in speech at all. In the court’s view, California’s choice to define Ryan’s maps as the “practice of land surveying”—a profession ordinarily requiring a license—transformed his speech into “conduct” outside of the First Amendment’s protection. But the Supreme Court has already said that government cannot simply call speech the “practice” of a regulated job and strip it of First Amendment protection.

Now Ryan is asking the Supreme Court to take up his case and protect the First Amendment rights of everyone who is simply providing information to willing customers.

“I provided a valuable service for years to great acclaim,” Ryan said. “Taking down my company and others like me stifles growth and hurts entrepreneurs and customers alike.”

“Repurposing public data isn’t surveying, it’s free speech,” said IJ Senior Attorney Paul Avelar. “Speech is speech whether you’re paid for it or not. Money changing hands doesn’t make this any less an act of speech.”

“Relaying information is speech, and California cannot get around the First Amendment’s protection for free speech by simply imposing a licensing requirement,” said IJ Attorney Mike Greenberg. “At its core, this is yet another example of an established industry using the government to shut down popular, innovative competition.” 

IJ defends First Amendment rights and economic liberty nationwide and Michael’s case demonstrates the need to answer this increasingly common situation, which is also being asked in a similar petition of certiorari that IJ is filing on behalf of a North Carolina drone operator. Other examples include IJ’s successful defense of a Mississippi mapping company that was similarly charged by its state’s surveying board with unlicensed practice. IJ also recently won appeals court decisions in free speech cases on behalf of a veterinarian in Texas and tour guides in Charleston, South Carolina.

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To arrange interviews on this subject, journalists may contact Phillip Suderman, IJ’s Communications Project Manager, at [email protected] or (850) 376-4110. More information on the case is available at: https://ij.org/case/california-mapping/