Oyez.Org Releases Supreme Court MP3 Archives

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?"

Comments

"OYEZ"

[pompousjerk]

...according to Google and dictionary.reference.com, means hear ye.

Re:"OYEZ"

[PolR]

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.

Re:"OYEZ"

[Anonymous Coward]

We can still sometimes hear that in French period films.

<French maiden> Oh, monsieur! Why am I bleeding between my legs?
<Dirty Schoolmaster> That just means you're becoming a woman. Now we must complete the transition - come into my office.
* a few minutes later *
<Dirty Schoolmaster> Oyez! OYEZ! OYEZ! Aahhhhhh.

Re:"OYEZ"

[Anonymous Coward]

God I think you need a french lesson. Oyez vous l'obligeance d'Ãtre un peu moins taouin? Criss d'épais.

Re:"OYEZ"

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I think a french lesson is one of the last things I need, but thanks for the concern.

Curiously, Babelfish pukes on both 'taouin' and 'Criss'... is Babelfish at fault, or do you have spelling issues with your own French?

Re:"OYEZ"

[Anonymous Coward]

No I'll just chuckle quietly, since obviously you got the épais part right. Class dismissed.

Now THAT is foresight!

[MarkusQ]

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!

[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!

[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.

Re:Now THAT is foresight!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank You Captain Obvious!!!

I recommend you listen to....

[saden1]

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

Re:I recommend you listen to....

[pacc]

If you don't want to slashdot yourself with 60 MB of mp3 there's a transcript available here.

Re:I recommend you listen to....

[booch]

Interesting case. (For those who haven't clicked the link to the MP3 or text of the decision, it says that laws against inter-racial marriages are unconstitutional, under the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.)

It seems that you could apply almost exactly the same argument to same-sex marriages (and other anti-homosexual laws). The 14th Amendment doesn't say anything about race; it says the laws should apply to all people equally.

You could make an argument that the 14th Amendment would apply to age distinctions as well, invalidating arbitrary ages for various things -- marriage, drinking, driving, etc. But the court also said that you do have to consider reasonable factors.

Re:I recommend you listen to....

[menscher]

Kinda sucks that 2 hours 14 minutes into it, the final conclusion is cut off. Reminds me of "The Matrix Reloaded". You'd think there would be some sort of conclusion.... Maybe it was just a glitch with that one .mp3? Guess I'll have to listen to another.

Re:I recommend you listen to....

[saden1]

Umm...Judges make their decisions months after hearings. If you want to know the outcome, the court was unanimous in striking down the law and told Virginia and the rest of the states to go hump a donkey.

I may have made a mistake

[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

Not completely off-topic.....

[Bob Bitchen]

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 of posts here means that others feel the same way I do toward the Supreme Court now?

I think it should be renamed to:
The Burrito Supreme Court

yeah that sounds about right....

"When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President.
Now I'm beginning to believe it."
-- Clarence Darrow

YOUR JOKE SUCKS DICK! GET OVER IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so cool...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

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.

What have you got against Latins?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Burrito Supreme Court

Wow. So you use ethnic food to bash something that is predominantly white? So by your reasoning anything that is not white (or created by whites) it is automatically inferior? When you fuck up in a game do you say: "That was gay."

Or when a white person listens to rap music do you call them "wigger"?

Do you think words like nigger, spic, and kike when someone from that particular group pisses you off?

What a sad little life you have dude. Variety of ethnic/culture groups is what makes the world great. Accept it and turn your life around for the better :)

That was quick

[Shishio]

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.

Re:That was quick

[Anonymous Coward]

But why aren't there BitTorrents of them yet? I would have thought that someone like a member of the EFF would have torrents or them started by now.

Anybody know how to get source copies (tape, I suppose) on the cheap, so Ogg Vorbis audio can be made of them?

One correction

[tregoweth]

The US Supreme Court's multimedia site, Oyez.org

While they provide Supreme Court multimedia, they are not an official Supreme Court site.

Wow...

[cjkarr]

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

Re:Wow...

[motown]

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.

Re:Wow...

[an_mo]

it would also save you bandwidth

Re:Wow...

[an_mo]

You could improve the presentation by adding a short summary of the case and a link to the transcript.

Re:Wow...

[cjkarr]

No transcript links, but the facts of the cases now accompany the links.

-Chris

BitTorrents

[cjkarr]

As soon as I am able to figure out how to place these audio files as BitTorrents, we'll have it from Oyez.org. In the meantime, if you want to do it yourself, go ahead. :-)

-Chris, Oyez Technical Lead

Bush v. Gore

[cjkarr]

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.

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

-Chris, Oyez Technical Lead

Open Government, Please

[DustMagnet]

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

[dschuetz]

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.

where's the RIAA

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, someones distributing MP3 files - it MUST be a copyright infringment. Quick someone tell the RIAA so they can sick their lawyers on them.

The RIAA vs the US Supreme Court. We can only hope. :-)

naming convention

[johnny_4_president]

the naming convention of these files could use a little work, they're all named argument.mp3;

would there be a problem with a naming convention that would not only make a list of them instantly recognizable, but sort them in chronological order?

for example: 1967_Walker v Birmingham.mp3

thanks for your hard work on this exceedingly worthwhile project.

did you also know that these can be heard on sundays, on C-Span radio, 90.1 FM for those close to washington DC, and on XM satellite. a nice way to spend a sunday afternoon when there are no Redskins games to watch.

Re:naming convention

[cjkarr]

The naming convention is partly due to the fact that we are using Cocoon as a content system and it's easier to use the names as they are for any number of reasons that would bore anyone here.

However, when you click the link, the code responsible for sending the MP3 will attempt to set a Content-disposition field so that while the name is argument.mp3, the "Save As" dialog boxes will suggest something more descriptive.

Let me know if this doesn't work for you. I know some browsers don't support it, but I thought we had tested on the major ones.

-Chris

MP3

[booch]

It seems odd that they'd use a patent-encumbered format. You're required to use a licensed encoder and player. So the information is still not "freely" accessible to the general public. I'd like to see them switch to Ogg Vorbis.

Re:MP3

[cjkarr]

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

Curiously missing

[bobKali]

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

Hmm...

[schnits0r]

I tihnk it would be funny to have a court case of the RIAA on MP3 format.

Loving v. Virginia? Interracial marriage bans end.

[ChaosDiscord]

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

In the future, some more context would be good.

The Loving v. Virginia decision overturned a number of a laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Here is a summary of Loving v. Virginia with the Supreme Court's opinion.

The server doesn't resume.

[merriam]

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 and Speex are worth a look. Ogg Vorbis is good at 48k mono, but is surprisingly bad at 32k.