[bedelman]

I'm the author of the article linked at the start of the thread. Replying to try to focus the discussion on the specific change I was writing about.

Piker, can you say more about how "the change" make the documents "accessible" (or more accessible)? They were already at Internet Archive just fine. Several sites already copied the documents from IA and added their own presentation, cross-linking, notifications, and other services on top. I don't see the proposed changes as helping with this. Indeed, by sending the latest data only to CourtListener but not to IA, the proposed changes stand in the way of the other sites and services you envision -- as it seems they'll now have to license the data from FLP/CL (on a paid basis), rather than get it free directly from IA. These are the general concerns I was trying to present in my article.

[piker]

>> FLP also proposed to upload litigation materials to IA in only machine-readable formats compressed into enormous multi-gigabyte tarballs, ending the human-readable individual HTML files that have for years made it easy for normal users with standard web browsers to see court records.

Perhaps the "only" is telling here. Were they previously also uploading the tarballs? No wholesale user would want to scrape the thousands of extra pages of HTML to download the content. So if they weren't already uploading the tarballs, this is actually a beneficial change.

[bedelman]

Previously FLP was uploading files that users can read with a web browser -- HTML, PDF, and also XML with metadata. I could and did link directly to HTML and PDFs, including circulating these materials with coauthors and research assistants and members of the press.

If FLP begins uploading only huge tarballs, and not the individual constituent files, I won't be able to do any of that.