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The Courts Government Your Rights Online News

Oyez.Org Releases Supreme Court MP3 Archives 42

Posted by timothy from the your-rights-online-the-real-thing dept.
jeblucas writes "The US Supreme Court's multimedia site, Oyez.org, has released numerous archives from seminal cases from the 50's, 60's and 70's. They are available in MP3 format for the first time. Previously you could order cassettes and listen to .smil RealAudio, but who wants to do that? Want to learn more about: The Right to Remain Silent? Roe v Wade? Affirmative Action?"
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Oyez.Org Releases Supreme Court MP3 Archives More

Oyez.Org Releases Supreme Court MP3 Archives

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  • "OYEZ" (Score:3, Informative)

    by pompousjerk ( 210156 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @12:42AM (#6229940)
    ...according to Google and dictionary.reference.com, means hear ye [reference.com].
    • Actually, Oyez is the second person of the imperative for the French verb ouir and it is now fallen into disuse. Although the correct English equivalent is "hear", Oyez still survive in the French culture in the sense of listen because heralds used to precede public annoucements with the shout Oyez! Oyez!. We can still sometimes hear that in French period films.

  • numerous archives from seminal cases from the 50's, 60's and 70's. They are available in MP3 format

    Wow! That boggles my mind! I want to know who had the foresight to record the cases in MP3 format way back in the 1950s. And even more importantly, I'd like to know if they have any investment tips to share...

    -- MarkusQ

    • Re:Now THAT is foresight! (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually they recorded on to tape at that time (still do?) and then captured them with a PC and converted to mp3. MPEG1-3 is only 10 years old roughly. It would've been neat to have it then though

      HTH

      • Re:Now THAT is foresight! (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Wow, dipshit, I didn't think people were actually dumb enough to not get that joke. And by the way, MP3 has been around since about 1988. Get your facts right before you sound like a fucking baffoon.

        • I may have made a mistake (Score:1, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          but I didn't stoop to the level of childish namecalling and irritation over no one laughing at a bad joke.

          Please, if you aren't mature enough to state ideas in a reasonable way then maybe you should stay off slashdot.

          HAND

  • I recommend you listen to.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by saden1 ( 581102 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @12:53AM (#6230040)
    One of the lease publicized cases in the history of the Supreme Court cases is Loving v. Virginia.

    If you are truly interested in history and how far we have come I recommend that you listen to: Loving v. Virginia [oyez.org]
  • I think it's a great resource to be able to listen to the words as they were spoken, we all know how poorly email communications can be. How many times has someone completely misread an email you've sent? A lot gets lost in the written word. But.....

    Everytime I see (or hear) something about the Supreme Court I think back to the 2000 Pres. Election. They so undermined their objectivity and tarnished their role in our society that I just have a hard time at each mention of the name. I wonder if the lack
    • Bush v. Gore is online as SMIL. The MP3s released here are only a small subset of the complete Oyez collection. We're working to release them all, but I'm essentially a single man show here with the MP3's, so it may take some time. If you want to see a particular audio file released, send us a message via our feedback form [oyez.org].

      In the meantime, visit Bush v. Gore [oyez.org]. The audio is under the "Audio" link, and requires the latest version of Real Player.

      -Chris, Oyez Technical Lead

  • This is so cool... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @01:37AM (#6230355)
    I'm downloading Gideon v. Wainwright, the case that established a defendant's right to an attorney if he could not afford one. See the book and movie, Gideon's Trumpet.
  • The server is currently experiencing a heavy volume of traffic, and is unable to service your request. Please try back in a few minutes.

    Just a few hours and not even on the front page, and we've managed to melt their servers. Well, it looks like it'll be a nice source of legal enlightenment once it's back up. Maybe I can sneak a few of the recordings in my iPod playlists and learn something when I walk with it. Definitely going into my bookmarks.

  • One correction (Score:3, Informative)

    by tregoweth ( 13591 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @07:18AM (#6231622)
    The US Supreme Court's multimedia site, Oyez.org

    While they provide Supreme Court multimedia, they are not an official Supreme Court site [oyez.org].

  • Wow... (Score:5, Informative)

    by cjkarr ( 23970 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @08:28AM (#6231956) Homepage
    I'm the technical lead on Oyez. I didn't imagine that this would make Slashdot quite so fast... Egads... Though it explains the dead server this morning. :-) It's fine now, though if the heavy traffic volume message comes up again, mail me using the link on that page.

    This release is a bit premature. We are working with Creative Commons to license this audio so that others can download and share and create non-commercial derivative works of the audio. If you would like to do me a huge favor, please download the cases you like and place them on your favorite peer-to-peer network. We're looking to make these audio files as widely available as possible, while showing that there are substantial non-piracy uses for P2P networks. (It'll be harder for the RIAA to argue next time to shut down these networks when they are used to distribute Supreme Court audio to citizens. :-])

    In any case, look for a press release soon. I just posted that URL so that Oyez users would download the audio and start sharing. I didn't imagine that it would get this publicity so quick.

    Anyways, I'll be monitoring this thread, so if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please let us know. We're a very user-centric site. :-)

    -Chris Karr, Oyez Technical Lead
    • A word of advice, though. You might want to publish these archives in Ogg Vorbis format (or better: Ogg Speex format if all recordings are human voice only) instead of MP3 format, since this could save you any possible patent licensing fees.
    • You could improve the presentation by adding a short summary of the case and a link to the transcript.

    • This means many dial-up users can't get a complete file. It would be a very useful feature to add.

      I agree with motown that Ogg Vorbis [xiph.org] and Speex [speex.org] are worth a look. Ogg Vorbis is good at 48k mono, but is surprisingly bad at 32k.

  • Open Government, Please (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DustMagnet ( 453493 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @08:56AM (#6232209) Journal
    It drives me crazy that the highest court in the land is afraid to let the American public see what's really happening. I can't fly out to Washington every time there's a court case, yet they think allowing the public in the room is good enough. Reporters taking notes on paper and people drawing pictures in 2003 is silly. They even admit they don't trust the public to understand what's really happening. Too bad TV/radio didn't exist when the constitution was written.

    I'm very glad to see that some kind of recording is made and may be released someday.

  • May It Please The Court (Score:3, Informative)

    by dschuetz ( 10924 ) * <.gro.tensad. .ta. .divad.> on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @10:13AM (#6232950)
    This is really cool. Some years back, someone made a big splash (and pissed off a bunch of people, if I recall correctly) when he took a bunch of Supreme Court tapes, edited them down, added some basic commentary, and published 6 cassettes along with a book (called May It Please The Court). It covered 20-some cases, from Roe v Wade to flag burning to creationism. (I see there's a second book, focusing on First Amendment cases, as well.)

    I highly recommend this, as the commentary and text really help the reader/listener to understand what's going on. It's truly fascinating, even just from the standpoint of how these procedings operate (it's almost closer to a debate than a courtroom), and gives incredible insight into why the Court rules one way or another, at a more "human" level (it's not all dry legalese).

    I haven't checked out oyez.org yet (hopefully it's recovering), so I don't know how much it has as far as commentary or background, but hopefully it'll be as interesting as this book was.

  • MP3 (Score:2)

    by booch ( 4157 )
    It seems odd that they'd use a patent-encumbered format. You're required to use a licensed [mp3licensing.com] encoder and player. So the information is still not "freely" accessible to the general public. I'd like to see them switch to Ogg [ogg.org] Vorbis.

    • Re:MP3 (Score:3, Informative)

      by cjkarr ( 23970 )
      Ogg is on our list of things to do. The reason MP3 was chosen was because its much wider public acceptance and digital audio devices overwhelmingly play MP3.

      We used iTunes as the initial encoder, and later downsampled the files using LAME. Since iTunes is licensed, the encoding side is covered. As far as the players, 99% of our audience will be using licensed encoders anyways. This gets back to the issue of MP3 acceptance v. Ogg acceptance.

      -Chris
  • Is Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios (the Betamax case). Perhaps if enough people requested it (hint hint)...

  • Hmm... (Score:2, Funny)

    by schnits0r ( 633893 )
    I tihnk it would be funny to have a court case of the RIAA on MP3 format.

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