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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.