[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.