[riprock]

This needs to also happen for case law (free as in beer). How absurd is this:

"Pursuant to common law tradition, the courts of California have developed a large body of case law through the decisions of the Supreme Court of California and the California Courts of Appeal. The state supreme court's decisions are published in official reporters known as California Reports. The decisions of the Courts of Appeal are published in the California Appellate Reports.

The content of both reporters is compiled and edited by the California Reporter of Decisions. The Reporter maintains a contract with a private publisher (as allowed by Government Code Section 68903) who in turn is responsible for actually publishing and selling the official reporters. The current official publisher is LexisNexis." [0]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_California [0]

http://www.lexisnexis.com/clients/CACourts/ [1]

[bpd1069]

Back when I was much younger (CDROMs had just become accessible with read speeds of 150Kb/s) I had an idea to publish volumes of case law on a CDROM. After seeing no technical reason why the idea couldn't work I hit a brick wall. Turns out the case law is free, but the pagination is copyright. Case Law is cited by the page number and without that common 'index' the citations are meaningless. At that time I was convinced that things are broken to the advantage of those who profit/monopolize a product or service. This was in the late 80's, and my drive to disrupt didn't exist.

[rayiner]

Case law is free as in beer and free as in speech.

What isn't free is all the work Lexis Nexis and West Law do to edit, cross-reference, index, etc, cases. As a practical matter, these additional features are indispensable, so the text of the opinions alone is of relatively less value.

[btilly]

Give Google access to all of the raw documents, and they will gladly cross-reference, index, etc all of the cases. I'd be willing to bet money that they will make it available for free, and wouldn't be surprised if they do a better job than Lexis Nexis or West Law do.

The one thing that Google likely wouldn't do is edit. But that's because they can't do that by algorithm.

[snambi]

this is probably true. provide access someone will gladly cross-reference, index and make it available.

[nathan_long]

>> What isn't free is all the work Lexis Nexis and West Law do to edit, cross-reference, index, etc, cases.

Sure. But they are paid with public dollars to do this work, and so are effectively working for the public. Therefore, their contract should state that their work must be made public.

Really, it shouldn't matter to them whether they get the right to sell copies or get paid more up front for the work; they make money either way. But it matters for democracy.

[anigbrowl]

Yeah, but all those reports are freely available online from the courts websites. The publishers just publish them in paperbound form.

[riprock]

Can you provide a link? I am not a lawyer, but I have seen http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions-slip.htm which provides a link to the LexisNexis website for opinions from 1850 - Present.

The LexisNexis website also states "There is no charge to search, retrieve or save documents from the California Official Reports Web site, and there is no copyright on opinion text. The site, however, is for personal, not commercial, use."

From this, I assumed commercial use would require purchasing or licensing something from LexisNexis.

[anigbrowl]

This is new in the last few months. I think you can do what you want with the opinions, but you can't build it on top of their servers.

[DannyBee]

Try getting them in bulk for free, so you can republish them. Or not through lexis/westlaw's website, for free.

(I'm cheating a bit here, I've actually been a part of fighting this fight for a very long time.)

Note that these exclusive contracts are also longer term than one would think.

Numerous reputable folks and and reputable companies have offered to host the opinions in bulk, for free, at no cost to the courts, as well as providing search/etc. However, the courts hurt for real budget, and they all see selling these contracts as a revenue source.

(I'm generalizing to both state and federal courts here)

In the case of PACER (you may remember PACER from stories about Aaron Swartz :P), it sadly makes up for a lot of budget shortfall in the courts. PACER's revenue is > 100 million a year.

If you want to hear the long sad story, you can probably find a number of writings by Carl Malamud talking about it.

If you just want to get angry, it would suffice to check out the lawsuits over trying to claim copyright in the page numbering between westlaw and lexis, etc.

[rdl]

It's almost like it would be nice if a hacker used library access to download a bunch of federal court electronic records and provided public access to them, possibly with the assistance of a major university.

[anigbrowl]

Spare us your sarcasm. What you want is already available via http://bulk.resource.org There is no copyright on judicial or legislative proceedings, nor any restrictions upon their distribution.

[rdl]

It is now. Wasn't that the whole reason aaronsw liberated PACER? (I honestly still don't understand all the parts of the federal court publication system; PACER, the commercial stuff like Lexis/Nexis, physical records, aaronsw's actions, etc. -- there are a lot of fairly undocumented parts)

[anigbrowl]

Carl Malamud is the person behind resource.org. aaronsw downloaded several million documents breaking PACER's TOS, but no action was taken. The archive and 'firehose' feeds on resource.org are mainly thanks to a long-running lobbying campaign by Malamud and others. The PACER system is semi-free to access but part of why it has overhead costs is that it's integrated with ECF, which attorneys use to file documents in Federal court. The cost structure is a legacy of its heritage as a document retrieval system used in brick & mortar court offices where the per-page cost was tied to the paper and printing overhead. Copyright has never been an issue in regards to PACER.

[Centigonal]

Does this mean that you have to pay someone if want to make absolutely sure that you're not breaking the law for some given action in California?

[pi18n]

You would have to hire a lawyer in any state due to the sheer number of laws; this seems to say in CA that lawyer also has to buy public domain papers from a private entity.