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Thursday, August 23, 2007
Opening up the American lawbooks
From copyfightin' law Tim Wu and government info liberator Carl Malamud comes these two pieces of news about the future of the American legal code:
Carl sez, "Public.Resource.Org released a gigapixel 'photograph' of 1000 pages of U.S. case law, a volume of what is known as the Federal Reporter. Accompanying that is a letter to West Thomson asking why the decisions of U.S. courts are not available in an unencumbered format. As part of the same initiative of making our courts more accessible, we also published the AT&T v. Hepting oral argument and will be publishing other video proceedings as well."
Tim sez, "I wanted to write to tell you about the launch of the world's first completely free and public domain legal search engine: altlaw.org. Right now, legal search is dominated by a duopoloy -- Westlaw and Lexis -- that charge hundreds of dollars an hour for searching the nation's laws. Altlaw.org is a pilot project to make the nation's caselaw freely searchable by anyone. The nation's laws are supposed to belong to the people, yet they are amazingly hard to get access to." Link to AtLaw, Link to Public Resource's Federal Reporter pic, Link to a video about Public Resource's project
posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:27:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments
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