Democracy in the Dark? 595
scubacuda writes "Melissa Bar has written an insightful article on how Westlaw and Lexis Nexis restrict public access to case law databases. She writes, '[T]he courts and the court's words belong to us. In more ways than one, the American people have already paid for the case law produced by our courts. Commercial vendors must not be allowed to highjack our law or dictate who may have access to it. By refusing to allow public libraries to purchase electronic subscriptions that can serve their patrons, Westlaw and LexisNexis are closing the door on information.' Individually purchasing the documents over credit card is incredibly expensive, making it virtually inaccessible to most library patrons."
Ummm... (Score:4, Informative)
If you don't want to pay for it, look up the information yourself...
Rights (Score:3, Informative)
EU Example (Score:5, Informative)
I don't always agree with the EU decisions, but:
http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/search/search_casThis is how the EU handles it - case law in a free searchable online database.
A better resource for the layman (Score:5, Informative)
My roomate who is a corp lier in NYC uses findlaw.com when he is doing casual research, since he normally has to bill his Lexus time out to a client at a huge fee.
Google Law anyone?
"The only thing I enjoy more than doing the crossword puzzel, is actually finishing it."
Re:Ummm...[??] (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.law.cornell.edu/ [cornell.edu]
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/law/ [uchicago.edu]
Public vs. University Libraries (Score:3, Informative)
When I went to college, the entire school was eligible for the university's Lexis-Nexis site license. This didn't mean just the law school... this meant everybody. Software was available that I could have loaded on my PC, and I could have searched from my dorm room.
The university's library computers (and computer labs) had the software on them as well.
Now here's the interesting part -- if you were a resident of the surrounding towns (not affiliated with the university in any other way!), you were eligible to use the library -- and all its' resources.
Yes, that included Lexis-Nexis. (And JAMA, and The Lancet, and a hundred other publications that cost more than some cars.)
I have no illusions -- Lexis-Nexis was getting a considerable amount of money for allowing such use... far more than they'd ever be able to wring out of a public library. The university needed the subscription, it was just a happy circumstance that everyone else benefited.
Here's to libraries with deep pockets.
Re:Welfare, anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
So basically, everyone gets water.
Re:Ummm...[??] (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lexis-Nexis (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone have a few tens of millions dollars laying around?
You have hardware (which is comparatively cheap).
You have scanning and OCR work (which is the most labor and time intensive part).
You have the delivery of information costs (which can get expensive with millions of hits a month)
You have the software development costs (which aren't as expensive as any of the aforementioned, except maybe hardware).
You're talking about many millions of bucks to get something even rudimentary up and running.
it sucks.
Page numbers are copyrighted. (Score:4, Informative)
Without a Westlaw page number, it is very difficult to cite a case in a court. Our law librarian used to rage on about this.
Re:This relates to my theory on lawyers, and why t (Score:1, Informative)
what do you do?
boy, I'm certainly not going to jump on the GNU/Linux bandwagon if it means lowering my rates...
Re:Ummm...[??] (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This relates to my theory on lawyers, and why t (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A better resource for the layman (Score:3, Informative)
The phrase "google law" strikes fear into the hearts of judges, clerks and court registries, however, as they foresee a flood of caselaw handed up by self-represented litigants, none of which are on point, some of which were overturned on appeal [but this fact isn't apparent from a keyword search], and most of which don't actually mean what the litigant thinks they do.
TNSTAAFL (Score:1, Informative)
For example, if look up information at the US District and US Bankruptcy courts [uscourts.gov] they charge fees [uscourts.gov].
LDS performs hard copy searches of court records in municiple, county, state, and federal jurisdications across the US. The customers paid for someone to physically to go to clerk offices and request documents on pending suits, pending judgements, UCC filings, bankruptcies, etc.. The customer could have done this themselves. They would have to know which clerk to search and still have to pay a fee to the jurisdication for the documents.
Heinlein would say TNSTAAFL
Online Legal Databases (Score:1, Informative)
There is a great deal of law available online - see www.findlaw.com for a good example. What Westlaw and Lexis do is collect it all, substantively categorize it (by headnotes or key numbers which are West's legal work product) and make it available for searching at a level much more advanced than Google etc.
While I am sympathetic to the library's plight, West has a right to run a business and the cry for "freedom of information" cannot change that.
Re:Sooo... (Score:2, Informative)
Who would do such a thing? Follow the money. Those dirty "trial lawyers" that stand to make all sorts of money by strengthening their state and court supported (go figure) monopoly.
versuslaw and the web (Score:2, Informative)
There is a law that states that non-classified government documents fall under the public domain. This means that anyone can request the information, and cannot be charged for it (though a processing/handling fee may be applied). Some courts aren't happy about this (and have signed illegal exclusivity agreements with companies like Lexis and WestLaw, but VersusLaw's owner has been pretty good about reminding them of the legalities), but most courts are have web pages and post their daily proceedings for anyone to grab (and grab they do). The trick is finding the web pages, and then getting around things like image-based pdf's with no actual text in them, etc.
When you pay for access at places like VersusLaw, WestLaw, etc., you are not paying for the case data (most of these places offer free searching, and Lexis even offers free recent case data for many federal jurisdictions), you're paying for the value-addition of the search engine, formatting, spell checking, etc - things that hard-working, relatively low-paid data entry people have laboriously checked, typed, scanned, etc.
Eternal Vigilance Etc (Score:4, Informative)
In about 450 BC the Plebians won one of the earliest and most significant victories for equality in the western legal tradition. They forced the publication of the laws. The laws were inscribed on twelve tablets and made accessable to all citizens. This established a pinciple which, has survived to this day, that the law ought to be published. (Twelve Tablets) [csun.edu]
Even so there are several new and non-so-new developments that have really undermined this ancient victory for equality. The law has become so complex that no one really knows what all of it says, and only a privileged class of experts really know what any small part of it says. So we are again in a position where most people have no direct access to the law, and where there is a privileged class that serve as intermediaries between the people and the law. This new development of effectively copyrighting parts of the law, or limiting access to legal databases, is really just a continuation of this trend. It stengthens the hold that the wealthy have over access to the legal system.
moron doesn't read parent post (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Should be free like speech AND like beer (Score:3, Informative)
West had a good idea with those key cites 100 years ago, but a default index system in google would work just as well.
There is NOTHING particularly complex about these sites. We have text files which contain case info, which is taken verbatim from the court. The summaries are of dubious value, and the first thing they will tell you in law school is to not use the headnotes are summaries. Read the case.
goodl ol' suppy and demand
Thats right. Here we have a small supply, and huge demand, thus high prices. Read the article. The lexis people describe their discount rate as being $9 per CASE.
Perhaps what is in order is some sort of open source project, similar to the gutenberg project? There is no legal reason this can't be done...
There was such a project, it was called FindLaw.com. Westlaw purchased the site in 2001. Now it sucks. What a surprise.
you can't have this either (Score:2, Informative)
Your own Municipal Code is probably copyrighted. What's more it may be copyrighted by a private firm that sold it to your city (and several others). What this means is that the city and its citizens cannot copy their own municipal code without permission.
With all the copyright extensions lately, we better check if we are still allowed to copy the Constitution.