[bpchaps]

Heh. And yet case.law has a 500 case download limit except those who have been approved by research agreements that are mandatory by lexis nexis. I've been waiting since release night to get a research license approved. Granted, it's been less than a week.

What do you think would happen if somebody with a research agreement downloaded everything and released it all to the public? You'd probably then find that the two situations are very similar.

[rayiner]

To be clear, the download limit is imposed by Ravel, the startup that paid for the effort of redacting copyrighted annotations from the scanned images. Lexis later purchased Ravel, but the download limit comes from Ravel’s control over the redacted digitized images, not Lexis’s copyright over the source materials.

Now, what would happen if you breached the research agreement? You’d probably be sued for breach of contract. But that’s not what case.law is doing. It’s abiding by everyone’s legal rights: the original publishers who collected, archived, indexed, and added annotations to the case law, and the folks who helped digitize versions that could be freely distributed. The government paid for the courts so the cases are free, but it didn’t pay for all those other things and they aren’t free.

[pc86]

That's pretty tautological, isn't it?

> If someone did a very similar thing here to what Swartz did with JSTOR, this situation would then be very similar to what Swartz did with JSTOR.

[gnode]

No, the question is asking whether a similar act would result in a similar outcome; whether there is a crucial difference in how the two perceptibly similar things would interact with law.

Analogously, one could ask what would happen if someone avoided their taxes vs. evaded their taxes. Both could be seen as morally the same act, but the legal consequences are different.