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Democracy in the Dark?
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."
What if you wish to act as your own attorney? Seems like the deck is stacked towards the pros - while understandable for the companies that do this, it is nonetheless your right to represent yourself. This just makes it hard.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
make so much more than IT people. All the lawyers references books are bound in leather and make matching sets, making an expensive, intimidating wall of knowledge buttressing their skills.
In contrast, I look at my bookshelves, and see a hodge podge of O'Reilly books, Dummies books, Various OS Bibles (yeah, heretical, I know), few of which match, and few of which are leather bound.
I'm hoping that once IT stabilizes, O'Reilly can come out with a huge set of matching leather bound tomes that would make an imposing background for my IT work. Then I can charge $100/hour.
Of course, that would cost a lot, raising the barrier of entry, just like Lexus/Nexus does.
A. Rightmann
It isn't like Lexus Nexus and Westlaw have a monopoly on the information. You can still look it up on your own. All these services do is provide convienence via their search engines.
If you don't want to pay for it, look up the information yourself...
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Say Lexis Nexis has "hijacked" our access to the cases is not entirely accurate. What you're paying for is the service of bringing you that data.
It's like saying the water company shouldn't be allowed to charge for a natural resource which is rightfully everyone's. Again, you're paying for the service of bringing it to you.
Globe199
We only pay for the trials, not the searchabilaty of the proceedings. If you have a problem with that, why don't you write a DB that has all that info in it so we can all search it for free? Oh yeah, it costs lots and lots of money! And no, I'm not paying any more commie taxes just so you can search a database of case trials.
www.findlaw.com
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."
You can get access to case law from the courts themselves. Westlaw and Lexis provide a service allowing people to get this case law electronically and indexed very well. Don't we support companies value adding services to free information and charging for it? Isn't that the entire basis of the GNU public license. Some courts are putting their decisions online, where you can get it as well. But Westlaw and Lexis employ people to put all of this information together in a database, index it, and write abstracts. What is wrong with them charging for that?
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
Without going into the debate over whether lawyers suck, etc... In the article, the author gives 2 competing services that libraries can utilize that are in direct competition. While the author may not like Lexis or WestLaw, there are other options available online, not the mention the old tried and true way of getting your ass down to the courthouse and using the law library there!!! I have never been in a courthouse that didn't have a publicly available law library.
I hope that Ms. Barr realizes that she is a troll, but sadly most do not even know what they are doing.
Lexis Nexus and Westlaw don't own a monopoly on the law, but they do have a monopoly on publishing it via the internet. The only thing that I would like to see is ability for more companies to be able to publish the law, creating competition for these seach engines.
It's expensive to keep all that data online , easily referenced, and searchable. But that doesn't mean that they should be able to gouge us. More competition in this area would be good.
Also, these guys should really talk to google, Lexis Nexus lets you search for free, (though payment is required for viewing). What about a search on Google that mixed references to the law in with your normal search results?
http://www.findlaw.com
http://www.law.cornell.edu/
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/law/
I find this article to be just a bit whiny. Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw are not hijacking caselaw. Anyone that needs to access the caselaw can go into any library at a lawschool and search through the many, many, many indicies to find the cases and law reviews that they need to gain access to. I find it amazing that people expect to get access to something for free, especially when there has been a huge expense in creating the infrastructure to provide these resources. 15-20 years ago EVERY lawyer had to "look in the books" to find the caselaw that they wanted to cite. Now, it is easier, because of computerized search engines.
Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw are not like google, where google just creates a large cache of webpages. Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw also provide analyses of the various cases in their databases, as well as a list of every case that has ever cited the case that you are currently read and whether those cases agreed or disagreed with the outcome. The citatations can be extremely important to have because a lawyer does not want to cite a case that has been overruled by a higher court. To provide this service takes money, alot of money. It takes alot of employees to manually check everything is typed in perfectly and it takes alot of computer equipment to run the who database.
There are plently of companies which do this with public data, not just WestLaw, LexisNexis, who are the largest in their field.
The problem is this: The government either outsources the electronic publication of their information, or these companies hired people to go out and scan the public documents.
If it is the latter, then they have every right to charge access to their database- they've complied the data on their dime! However, if the government outsourced the publication, then the database should fall into public domain.
I recall one other database which did title searches on property, which were built completely from public data, and was sold back to the county and state because such a tool did not exisit until then, and to redevelop such a tool wasn't worth the effort (at the time). The data was public domain, but the relationships inside the DB was not.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
In the early nineties, I worked on a website: the Legal Information Institute, which is still going strong, I think. Our goal was to provide public legal info for free. We got our opinions straight from the courts, and (at least then) maintained local copies of legislative text (eg, US Code).
Lexis and Westlaw were going strong back then, too. As tempting as it may have been to just lift their versions of the documents we wanted to publish, we didn't. Their versions were copyrighted, just like a map maker can copyright a map. Following with that analogy, their versions (I believed) even contained intentional, hopefully harmless typographical errors to prove up theft. They also added value by providing analysis and indexing (keyword, etc.) that were totally absent from the public text.
So the point is -- contribute! There are dis-aggregated (free) sources for most of the public information anyone could want. The trick is bringing them together and providing useful analysis. We've done (IMO) a great job of that at LII, and there are other sites as well. When you start to appreciate the labor involved in providing such a service, you start to see why Lexis and Westlaw charge...
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
I'm afraid I don't understand this complaint. I can go down to my local state courthouse, wherein is housed a law library, which is publicly accessible, and avail myself of anything that West pubishes. I don't have to be an attorney to get in; the only difference between this and a public library is that you can't check anything out. I can even get printouts and copies made at the cost of reproduction only. There's a librarian there to help find stuff, although there's a plethora of signs reiterating the obvious - that they cannot offer legal advice.
Clean water, being a prime necessity should be accessible to everyone, even the poorest. Through charging for distribution, you deny this access. Hence water distribution should be ensured free of charge, on your relunctantly paid "taxpayer's money." Same goes for air, food and medical services. Of course, food is a little different, as delivering the same to everyone would contradict some people's belief. That's what welfare money is for.
Culture, you don't need to live, though this is arguable, so a price for the service given may be acceptable. Of course, this price should be fair, but what's fair, esp. in a country ruled by rich parasitic morons?
This article is a misdirected rant. It is beyond dispute that Lexis, Westlaw, et al. do not own any copyright to public records-- i.e. the actual text of the case decisions. What they do own-- and rightly charge for-- are enhancements they provide: case summaries, research aids, and, yes, the text in a searchable electronic database. It costs them money to develop these aids, and there's nothing wrong with charging for them.
The public is not deprived of access to the actual law-- every law school, almost every courthouse, and many large universities have collections of case reporters, statutes, and other legal materials in book form. Are they as easy to search as an electronic database? No. But they are available and can be used without charge, and, in the hands of a knowledgable person, used as effectively (if not more so*) as databases.
Contrary to the author's position, the internet has made the law much more accessible to regular people than it was a decade ago. Free databases may not have all of the old cases that pay services do, but they represent a huge step forward when compared to pre-internet days. Moreover, for most people untrained in the law, old caselaw is of much less use than current decisions.
*Databases like Lexis and Westlaw are, in some ways, harmful to non-lawyers. It is easy to simply plug words into a search query and assume that the result is reflective of the law on a particular issue. In fact, careful analysis of legal precedent is difficult, and to the untrained, legal databases can yield results that are more misleading than traditional book research, where points of law in a particular category were grouped together, allowing a researcher to see the development of trends or dissenting views.
That's why you pay them: To locate and retreive it for you.
Allow me to make a comparison: Is it a threat to democracy that I have to pay for the morning paper? How am I to stay informed about events if that information isn't free! It belongs to the public!
In both cases the information is still there, I'd just have to find it myself. Sure, I could spend my mornings calling the local police office to hear what's happened since yesterday. I could call various government branches and ask for their latest press releases. I could call all my friends and ask if something interesting happened in their neighborhood. I could call the sports teams I follow and ask how they did yesterday. Or, I can pay the paper 50 cents a day to find these things our for me, my choice.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
People don't understand that there was time, effort and money put into creating and maintaining these databases. The combination of an entitlement-oriented attitude and a lack of basic economic principles makes Slashdot seem like one big whine-fest sometimes.
The information is available to all with no cost (or whatever cost the government may charge), just not through these services. You are paying for convenience.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Either Lexis and WestLaw should do the right thing here, or the government should invest in putting cases on-line at least so Google can index them.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
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.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Why is it that so many proponents of OSS don't carry their philosophy over to free economic activity? Rather than complain about how Westlaw and Lexus Nexus should lower prices or give their information for free, why don't you start up your own searchable database? Why not get a group together to do so? That's how it works in capitalism folks.
If they truly are "gouging" us with prices, and the entire service could be offered considerably cheaper, then offer it yourself!
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Westlaw and Lexis provide an incredibly valuable service: they make the millions of judicial opinions actually useful for lawyers. Basically, they are like the google for judicial documents, except that in order to index all this information, they have to use teams of lawyers rather than pigeon clusters. We do not yet have sufficient technical knowledge to index judicial opinions, and so for now this process is very labor-intensive.
For example, Westlaw and Lexis have teams of lawyers to read over every decision as soon as it's handed down. They have to parse through the legalese to make a judgment about whether the case narrowed some precedent or broadened it. They need to find the most important passages in the opinion and put those clippings into conceptual pigeonholes (the "West Topic and Key" classification system defies comprehension). They need to write little summaries for each of these important passages so that lawyers glancing through thousands of query results will know whether something is relevant (these "Headnotes" are difficult to write). None of these tasks are easy. Not only can we not yet automate them, but a person not trained as a lawyer won't even recognize the relevant things to pick up on. Westlaw and Lexis really do spend an enormous amount of *expensive* human capital (these lawyers don't come cheap) to do the human indexing of the semantic web of legal documents, and that's what they are charging for. Law firms gladly pay up because using the index form Westlaw or Lexis gives you such an advantage over your adversary if he's stucking doing research with law books that he has no chance. The big lawyers these days never touch law books -- they are too disorganized and slow.
Thus, these companies have not "hijacked" the actual collection of case opinions. Even if they wanted to, they can't. Judicial opinions and statutes, like other governmental work products, enjoy no copyright protection whatsoever. This is why you are free to post as many gigabytes of Supreme Court opinions for free downloading as you like.
But just getting the opinions is useless. Either we come up with a technical means to index these documents as effectively as the teams of lawyers at Westlaw (very difficult) or we decide that in the public interest we need to use some of our tax money to support a public interest effort to make a similar database for the public (even more difficult).
Some cities and jurisdictions are finding out that maybe not all cases and information should be easily searchable on the web.
Consider a divorce case. Names, addresses, financial records, employment records, etc, etc.
Home assesment value, taxes.
Now match that against the (sometimes) public bulding permits. Home floorplans and dimensions.
Armed with a little research from the comfort of his own home, a would be burgular or stalker could case the home of a recently divorced woman, figuring out vulnerable access points, when she's at work...a photo from Terraserver, and you can sometimes see fences and tree lines.
Do the job with no one the wiser.
Some things should be hard to get.
Lexis and Westlaw provide very valuable services. They do not meerly post the text of the case.
Westlaw and Lexis have a search system which make web search engines look like a children's toy. Also, theattorneys who review _each_ of these cases provide lengthey head notes and check to make sure that each case is still good law. This is all very expensive to maintain.
If they were to allow public libraries to use these systems, lawyers would just send their clerks (who are generally students) to the local public library. How will they then make any money? If they go out of business, you are right back to using books. Not an easy task for someone who does not know what they are doing.
Private entities, such as corporations (gasp!) and individuals are free to purchase these services.
As someone who uses Westlaw every day, I am very grateful for its existence. It would be a shame if some whiney, "everything should be free" leftists ruined such a great resource.
She's not saying this information is free or should be free. She's saying that her public library can't even BUY access to these databases.
From the article:
"When our contract expired at the end of 2001, we attempted to negotiate a flat-rate Westlaw contract for all of the materials from the CD-ROMs, plus some other databases. We hoped to make legal databases available to the public at all of our branches, although with a limited number of concurrent users. Neither Westlaw nor LexisNexis was ready to offer such a contract to a public library. LexisNexis' Academic Universe product includes a legal database, but it is marketed only to schools and colleges. Public libraries cannot subscribe to Academic Universe. LexisNexis products available to public libraries don't have the legal database. Westlaw does not have any similar products.
Bear in mind that West Group and LexisNexis, the two largest vendors of online legal information in the country, do not offer their online legal products to public libraries for patrons to use."
And for those who say that the law is always available in hard copy volumes, I say that you can probably count on one hand the number of attorneys who don't, at some time, do research sweeps of Westlaw or Lexis Databases at some time during the research process. The volume of case law is simply too large and it's too easy to miss precedent if you rely only on hard copy.
It's not fair to let only certain parties have access to this information in electronic format - it's not bomb-making information after all. I would also argue that it's not fair for Lexis and Westlaw to set the prices for these databases beyond the reach of public institutions like libraries. As her article describes, these two companies essentially have a lock on the markeplace. Last I heard, extortion still wasn't legal.
I think "Lexus Nexus" is a car dealer somewhere.... :)
Lexis (Nexis is for news; now I guess they're calling themselves LexisNexis) and Westlaw don't have a monopoly (duopoly?) over the public domain information they publish, nor do they just regurgitate public documents. They provide editorial enhancements such as headnotes (flagging various legal issues), in some cases data input (not all of gov't is electronically available, esp. scads of older ones), various ancillary services such as notification when an anticipated case is decided, and, most important of all, a very powerful keyword search engine that blows away any of the free online tools (for example, you can specify how far apart two search terms can be, and other dependencies). You can quickly access hyperlinked services, like a database that will show you every time a given case was mentioned in later decisions, and whether it was mentioned in a good light, disapporvingly, or overruled. These other services are valuable, but could be cheap if they were sold in large volume rather than a select few.
For all this, they are very expensive. Very very expensive. LexisNexis and Westlaw are like a really cool drug that's coming off patent -- now anyone can do it. So let's run them out of business. I think it's a great idea, but we have to pay for somehow. For example, I'm surprised the author give short shrift to the laborious OCR scanning these companies did of old cases. Not only do the cases have to be scanned, but the resulting files have to be marked up for things like page numbers. The information is free, copying it is not -- even RMS says that.
It is more urgent than the author makes it out to be: it is becoming nearly imperitive to have access to these databases to practice law. Judges really do expect you to know about that case that came down 12 hours ago. The volume of decisions published increses exponentially. When the time required to hunt down the books becomes more expensive than the cost of using the database, a rich firm luxury becomes critical.
I think we shouldn't ask "how can we force these guys to lower prices" but "why isn't there an affordable public database of this material". Not just a server crammed with decisions, but also an affordable method of searching it. There is just so much data now that the Library of Congress card catalog is obsolete.
It would not be too much to expect the subscriber to contribute their own processing power to the task, or even to somehow distribute encrypted duplicates of various documents around the Net to make a huge, redundant, high performance database. Besides helping litiagants, this would also help the courts by fostering better lawyering, and help the people to learn about the law for itself.
Why not do it right now? Oh yeah, this would be really expensive. But as firms like Google have shown, there are high-performance distributed solutions that work.
It rains from the sky and runs through rivers, so I could get it at no charge from there. Why doesn't the store give it to me for free?
They're restricting public access to the water!
/syle
Should that not be the key point?
The refusal to allow public libraries to purchase?
--
Han Tacoma
~ Artificial Intelligence is better than none! ~
Seriously though, Title 17 states that all government works are to be free and available. There are state funded universities and libraries that maintain HUGE collections of government documents that you can use for absolutely no charge. These databases are Value-Added services. I dont go demand a free GPS unit from garmin because the satellites are owned by the govt.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
once again slashdotters wade in without regard to the facts...
.02c
The problems with Westlaw and to a lesser degree Lexis/Nexis are NOT that they are claiming to own the law -- OR the ability to search their damn databases...
1) Many jurisdictions sign contracts for these companies to be the *official* source of caselaw and statutes, and while some of the jurisdictions make adequate provisions for full and open public access, many don't and that leaves folks with minimal resources in very bad positions with regards to access. they don't make it easy to get info when they're not required to.
2) And this is a biggie... While West Pub. isn't claiming copyright on the actual law itself, they do claim copyright to the citation system. i.e. how one refers to a case when you're writing a brief, etc. Many jurisdictions *require* you to cite using a West method. When another service tries to duplicate this, West sues their asses off. So you can't do research someplace else and then be able to properly cite your sources unless you use the West service to get the proper cite. Sure, you can go to the library and find the West dead-tree version and get the cite, but that pretty much kills all the benefit of electronic research don't it??
I don't lay the blame with the publishers... they're just capitalist swine like the rest of us trying to maximize their $$ (albeit in a fairly ruthless fashion if you ask me...), I blame the various govts for supporting these pseudo-monopolies for so long... the legal publishers and the legal policy makers are so deep in bed with each other it is sickening... hmmmm... wonder why there hasn't been more reform before now...
my
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
VersusLaw is $8.95 per month for a basic subscription, is fairly comprehensive for case law (although not entirely), and offers boolean searching. IAAL, and I find it to be a useful tool. Of course, any law library should have regional reporters as well as federal and its own state's stuff. You can find these libraries at law schools and courthouses.
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.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Maybe its time to start the free law gutenberg project!
I used lexisnexus to research lawsuits agains't the company I was hired by. The university in 1987 had a humongous machine that was in the Graduate library hidden in a room where you accessed it via a 300 baud modem although 9600 baud modems were available at the time. The machine was designed to use only 300 baud. Thus, it was very time consuming and slow. I can imagine what the bill would have been.
LexusNexus also gives out the business licenses of the company for every state it is in. This includes the company names, the names of CEO and vice president and estimated earnings and body count. It was interesting to find out that the company I worked for had different names in various states for the same business line so they could compete on the same local,state and federal contract under different names(improves chances of winning). It was interesting also to find out that the people who ran the company as CEO and vice prez etc changed places in titles in each of these companies although in reality, they know who owned the company (CEO) and who the vice prez etc was. Hmmm! I wonder what benefit this would have by having the "real" CEO pretend to be the vice and the vice "pretend" to be the CEO in the other company (sometimes under different names) in each state...
So LexusNexus shed alot of light on the company I worked for. Needless to say it was an Indian company and I learned alot about how the biz game is played not only in H1B's but in winning contracts.
"Why would I as a consumer ever pay for their service if the library had it, therefor they just lost my money, and all the other people that would go to the library use the service and not have ot pay for it."
For the same reason that I buy the vast majority of books from Borders - convenience and time. I don't have time to schlep down to the library to pick up the latest book, even assuming there isn't a long waiting list for it. I buy a resource that is also provided free because my time is worth more to me. Perhaps I also want my own copy as well.
"And since this is a service that is of specific purpose, like reference materials, they could stand to lose a lot of money."
Ah, my heart weeps for Lexis and Westlaw. They could also stand to make some money. Public libraries should be treated like any other potential Westlaw or Lexis client - if they can pay (and there is no indication that they can't) - they should be allowed to buy access to the legal databases - even if it's only one user at a time. The author of the article is saying that Lexis and Westlaw won't even sell access to the public libraries.
Here is a story from almost two years ago on a case where there was a debate on the text of the law itself being copyrighted by a company. Seems a guy had the temerity to believe that since he and all his neighbours were bound by the regulations of the local building code, he should be able to post that text on the web. A court had ruled that he could not do this, that a company owned all rights to publication of the code.
This story today is not even on the same plane. Neither of these companies claim to own the text (the content) of the law they catalog: all they do is make it far more convenient to search. That's a service, nothing more. Sure, it would be nice if the government made an effort to publish the law for the public in a way that didn't require these expensive services, but they don't. Complain to Congress about it: it's not LexisNexis' fault! Without their service, who knows, you might be spending even MORE for a lawyer who has to do manual research through paper books and such.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
That's not a good response. While it's nice that there's some spotty availability of publicly reported caselaw online, you'll find you can't actually use any of the information you find this way, because West blocks everyone else from providing the official citation. Courts require any citations to provide the West Publishing volume and page number, so once you found something useful, you'd have to look it up again in Westlaw, Lexis, or the bound volume. West claims a copyright on the page numbers, even though the information is public. While they've worked out a deal with Lexis to provide the page numbers, the public is left twisting in the wind. See "West's Copyright Claim."
Only $100 an hour? Most IT consultants I know already get more than that. I've never met a lawyer that billed less than $150, and even that is ridiculously low. A first year associate, two months out of law school, is billed out at around $200 an hour by large firms.
I'm a lawyer with excellent karma. Something's gotta be wrong.
Companies certainly shouldn't be given copyrights on laws, building codes etc, which the public paid to create. On the other hand, if somebody like Westlaw has taken the trouble to produce a legal database searching system that is faster or better than what's publicly available, I don't see that they have to give it away for free. Finding and filtering the information is a valuable service.
Such services should be publicly available, but rather than force the companies to give them away I would rather see the government hire these companies as contractors to produce public access systems. Certainly don't give them ownership of information, but by all means pay them to do the job of organizing it and to produce access engines that the public, including libraries, can use.
It seems incredible that people have to pay someone $100/hour to tell them if something they want to do is legal. Yet the list of legally hazardous activities grows constantly as the law gets more complex. This is something computers can definitely change, and case law databases are only the beginning. Imagine a legal expert system that would listen to your situation and give you a competent legal opinion, whether it's for a criminal defense or adding a second story to your house. I doubt that such systems will exist anytime soon, but I hope that when they do the government will have the foresight to buy them from the developers and make them freely available.
As an attorney, I can tell you why we subscribe to Westlaw or Lexis instead of using the libraries available to us: CONVENIENCE. If I had to go to the library for every case I worked on in a day, I'd waste an enormous amount of my time. The cost of these services is perfectly acceptable to me because I can do all the same research, more efficiently, from the convenience of my own office, which makes me more productive.
We need to understand that "entitlement" does not apply to private sector resources. If you would benefit enough from a service that the price is reasonable, pay it. If not, stop complaining.
I think many of the ./ posters are missing the point. This isn't about Lexus/Nexus and Westlaw being denied reasonable profits. It's about using their near-monopoly to set prices and purchase terms that are at odds with the public interest. Some insight is buried in Lexus response: "although none of the plans would allow her to do what she wanted to do -- give unlimited, unmediated access in multiple locations to the LexisNexis legal information service at an unrealistic price."
./'ers are a bit of a hypocritical bunch...
Ms. Barr was not asking for unlimited access, although concurrent access is not a popular option for commercial software publishers these days. More importantly, she was asking for unmediated access - which Lexus evidently feels is inappropriate for the unwashed masses.
How is this different from the RIAA flexing it's muscle to stop file sharing? Aren't those also copyrighted works? Aren't the record publishers also entitled to reasonable profits? (Yes, I'm playing the devil's advocate here.) It's seems the
At least in this country, the role of the bar in mediating the interpretation and application of law has been recognized as having a constitutional aspect - the legal profession is required for the rule of law, upon which any constitutional society, is based to function. This is why solicitor-client communications are privileged. Is there an aspect of elitism? Probably - in Canada, solicitor-client communications are privileged, but doctor-patient and priest-penitent communications aren't, except on a case by case basis. I don't have a problem with that personally, but I suspect many would.
MHO. YMMV. Any resemblance between this post and real persons, or reality in general, was accidental.
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.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
I have to shake my head every time I see some weed head proposing the "information is free" concept. Yes, it would be nice if it was free along with everything else. The FACT OF LIFE is that is takes MONEY to put this information online. There are servers, payroll, facilities, etc, etc, etc. This all takes money. Companies like WestLaw and LexisNexis add value to this information making it worthwhile to pay for. This information would not even be available with out the dollars to keep it online. I will step off my soapbox now....
Be forwarned, IAAL. However, I am not associated with either company.
While the law itself is open and available to everyone free of charge, its analysis does cost money. This is similar to the situation with various linux distributions. The OS is free, but if you want expert help, you have to hire someone unless you are an expert yourself.
Free sources of law in Washington State: Washington State Cases, Laws, Regs, etc Laws, Regs, etc.. These are even searchable.What you get with Westlaw (I'm most familiar with it) and Lexis (I presume) is a very powerful search engine, coupled with analysis generated by those companies. By looking in the free sources published by the government, one can access the law (statutes, cases, etc). For statutes, Westlaw provides not just the text of the law, it also provides a short synopsis of most cases which have interpreted that law. West does a similar thing with case law and organizes its headnote information by "key number". All of that analysis speeds up research - but it is generated by someone who works for the companies - not for the government.
The point is, Westlaw etc. are merely adding value to something that is freely available to make it more useable. That's what any number of open source software companies do - just in a different context.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Yes, the law belongs to all of us but their server access belongs to them. If Westlaw and LexisNexis want to charge money to use the bandwith and servers that they pay for then that's fine.
Not everything is free as in beer!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I am often struck by how the same issues come up again and again in history, and how often past struggles for liberty have to be repeated. This struggle has a pretty long history going back at least to 450 BC. In Rome at that time there was no publicly accessable writen law. Instead the law was preserved by the an upper class (the Patricians) mostly as an oral tradition. Needless to say this put the lower class (the Plebians) at a considerable disadvantage when they went into court. They had no ready way of knowing what the law actually said.
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)
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, he just said this would pruposefully limit professional access, did you even read what he said. They don't want professionals getting it from the library,they want you to pay for it, since you'll then use their information to make money for yourself.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
The problem is that working in a building and being governed by it are not the same thing.
A good example is copyright law. It applies to everyone. Do you know how many people in the United States have absolutely no idea what *is* and *is not* okay according to copyright law? (Forget ethics, morality, whatever, we're just talking about the law itself.)
One author who I used to be fond of has taken to sending C&D letters to young teenagers who happen to run 'adopt-a-pet' websites loosely based on her work. She, of course, has the lawyers. They don't.
IF A LAW APPLIES TO A PERSON, THEY SHOULD BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND IT.
It's that simple. There should be no question in the mind of whether X, Y, or Z is covered as 'fair use'. There should be no question of whether it's okay to play your stereo outside--as I've heard people discuss lately, due to vaguely-worded noise statues. There should be no question of what the legal manner of passing on a highway is. (I've never yet seen anyone do it, but last I checked, Ohio had circumstances in which you're legally required to honk your horn first.)
You can't get in trouble for not knowing the mechanics of how a bridge works. (Well, you know, usually.) You *can* get in trouble for not understanding how your laws work.
YOU are,IMOHO, an idiot, and here is why:
Laws are not like construction. Laws are not like designing a building.
Laws are the rules that bind us all as a country. As such, each of us has a right, duty and obligation to understand them.
If they grow so complex so as to preclude this, we cannot excercise our duties and obligations as citizens.
Just my opinion.
dj
Hey, just because it's public info doesn't make it free. The reason why West and Lexis take this public information and bind it is to make money. They spend millions per year keeping two of the largest data warehouses in the world up and running 24/7 and completely up-to-date. They employ thousands of attorneys and librarians to write briefs on EVERY case posted in the system, cross-reference the cases for subject matter and context, and keep the warning symbols up-to-date. I'd really love to see the gummit do that effectively. Besides, the average unlimited user would have no idea what to look for, how to disseminate the information, and what the various warning symbols mean. Now, if you want to see the goods for free, just run down to your local federal despository library or public law library and they'll have every thing you want. As a matter of fact, it's pretty easy for anyone to cross reference cases and law. Here's about $6,000 worth of free advice: To look up a case, go to a legal encyclopedia and look up the subject matter you want. See the citations for cases that discuss it? Now, run over to the reporters, open that big leather and paper device call a BOOK, and flip to the page number. To look up a law, go to the common name table or subject index and look up the statute. Bam! There it is. Try FindLaw.com and thomas.loc.gov. BTW, the flat-rate contracts for firms cost millions of dollars. Seriously, the largest firm here in Omaha paid about 8 million for theirs. That's per year and can go up or down from year to year. If a public library has that much money to throw away, it would be a lot smarter to employ one or two paralegals or legal librarians and purchase a set of reporter, annotated codes, and legal encyclopedias. Shoot, most large law firms will donate old encyclopedias that are easily updateable to libraries. Oh yeah, Nebraska's web site has several areas that are play-to-pay. I think the idea is to charge user fees rather than jack up everyone's taxes. Why should I pay higher taxes for some schlub to slow down the Lexis and West systems on 50,000 document searches for DUI caselaw?
It's not a matter of designing them so they *don't* do that. It's a matter of people knowing what they do when they have to.
Like, oh, those large labels on said hairdriers?
Your example, not mine.
Do you seriously believe this?
If you want the case law go down to the court house where the case took place and get your free copy of that case. Perhaps when you've collected a large amount of these documents and compiled them into some form that allows for searches and easy access, you can give it away for free. But my money is against that ever happening.
Everyone is worth their hire.
They analyze the cases for you and do a lot of cross referencing. As well as a lot of other things, but more importantly, what's going to fund the non profit. You would need a staff to maintain your servers. Servers. Bandwidth. These things cost money. Enjoy trying to make it non profit
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Well the point is that laws are written in a legal vocabulary that takes a while to obtain. It's kind of like math; open a graduate-level math book and it looks infinitely incomprehensible. The difference with law is people assume that since the symbols it uses are verbal that they should be able to understand it.
Westlaw and Nexis aren't the problem.
There's nothing wrong with companies getting this information, organising, indexing, sending to subscribers etc etc, and charging for it.
what is totally an utterly wrong is when the courts, tribunals and governmetn agencies give exclusive distribution contracts to ANYONE.
they should be acting like common carriers.
and they should defeinitely be amintaining their own libraries.
if the big end of town find it easier to pay someone to aggregate that information thats their perogative.
so long as everyone else can go to the source if they need it.
If the source amterial is still publicly available then why should aggregators be forced to give access?
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Leftists Often See A Crisis... when they should see an opportunity. 1. The case law is in the Public Domain. 2. Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw transform the PD info into a more useful form, but do so on terms that are unacceptable to a particular class of customers.
Crisis: The customers aren't being served! Bwahahaha!
Opportunity: Serve them. You can try this on a non-profit basis. For example, I know a guy who used to work for these guys who specialize in presenting information on the nightmarish complexity that is tax law. IIRC, either or both of the companies mentioned in the article are their competitors, and believe you me they don't enjoy competing with a non-profit. Maybe you can also do this as a for-profit. If there are only two major players, there's a good chance they have gotten fat and lazy, and haven't done everything they can to streamline operations. Put your heads together and figure out a way to beat them, and you might not only serve the libraries, but start stealing their other customers as well.
Of course, option 2 would actually require work, and you may just end up discovering that the current players are doing all they can do just to provide the service to anybody. You might even go broke. So, if you gotta choose...
BWAAAHAHA!
...is a very appealing option.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
...omphaloskepsis often...
The ancient Romans knew what they were doing when they made their laws accessible to everyone in a public place. Here's an introductory article, explaining why this was important, and here's the surviving text.
Of course, maybe in the last two and a half thousand years the patrician aristocracy has once again risen into the ascendent, unfettered by uppity tribunes of the People.