1.8 million pages of US federal case law to go online for free

Carl sez, "You hear a lot of rhetoric in Washington about public-private partnerships. Sometimes rhetoric meets reality ... Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase have reached an agreement for the release of a totally unencumbered repository of 1.8 million pages of federal case law, including Courts of Appeals decisions back to 1950. We had help from EFF to broker this deal and the repository will sport a brand-new Creative Commons mark—CC-Ø—which will allow us to affirmatively certify that this information is public domain. The legal information market has been the last bastion of what Yochai Benkler calls the industrial-style information economy. Today's announcement is poking a big hole in the walls of that garden." Link (Thanks, Carl!)

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Cicolini

Soon enough! Corporations which guard information have a broken business model in their future.

Beware stockholders!
Advice_Network

It’s really quite amazing to me to watch the process of all human knowledge making it’s way online. What is truly amazing, is knowing that someone is going to actually use this stuff. Access to it is going to really change the world, it’s not just theoretical.
rerutled

Next: scientific papers.

The research is paid for by your taxes. The papers are published in journals — often run by the most profitable scientific publishing arms of their publishing houses — where the authors pay to have them published ($125 per page is typical, with a typical length of 6-10 pages).

And yet, many journals persist in keeping those papers permanently behind locked doors, inaccessible to the public.
Church

Finally, a CC Public Domain mark! Awesome!
thomaskemp

“Today’s announcement is poking a big hole in the walls of that garden.”

Maybe, we’ll see. Most people don’t use court decisions for much. We lawyers use them all the time, but to use them, we have to reference the official cite of the case, which is a book and page number of a Thompson-West publication. Getting free access to the case law would not be all that helpful without the cites and I’m sure West isn’t going to be giving those away.
L.B. Jeffries

I wonder if Bluebook explains how to cite to this thing yet.
Kyle Goetz

L.B. Jeffries: BB rule 18 is for electronic and internet resources, no?

Also, Thomas Kemp, I’m working off memory of the Bluebook right now (I should know it, as I edit for a journal currently), and I think that it’s acceptable to cite to public domain sources (but I’m not sure about court cases since I’m not a lawyer yet).

I think it’s a shame that government-related records must cite to proprietary resources when there are non-proprietary resources easily available. It would be nice if we got some sort of courtcases.gov domain that hosted all these, and then citation to the electronic PDFs could be the official citation method.

But I bet West wouldn’t like that, nor would their lobbyists (I assume they have them).
belldl

To ThomasKemp above – I believe the volume & page numbers are ok to use, it was settled back in the ’90s (over West’s protests of course). That’s why you can see regional reporter page numbers (‘star pagination’) on LEXIS. Volume & Page numbers can’t be copyrighted. I don’t know though if this new service includes the page numbers however.

The main thing though that kind of makes this not-so-useful, is that you’re not going to get topic/keynumbers (which are copyrighted) – just keywords.
Benjamin

Case law as it should be – readable.
jphilby

Finally! I waited my whole life! For the first time, the people have access to the laws that govern them.

Well … except for the ones that are *secret* of course.

seatec astronomy
Iason

I’m really excited about this. I’ve always been frustrated that we didn’t, until now, have any practical way to get at case law, which is supposed to be all in the public domain, but through a pay service.

Question 1: How long before state case law becomes available?

Question 2: How long before Google makes a robust, lawyer-oriented search tool for this stuff and starts putting LexisNexis and West out of business?