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Washlaw offers indexing of state case law
The Washlaw website, a terrific free legal research resource provided by Washburn University School of Law, has been redesigned and updated so it's better than ever.
One of the things they are trying to accomplish is to move closer to a unified search engine for state case law across jurisdictions to make it easier to find state court opinions. So they're offering lawschools with case law on their websites the use of Washlaw's full-text indexing strategy to index it and make it easier to find.
WV Tax Assessor sues to remove state tax maps from website
According to a story in Ars Technica, a tax assessor in Kanawha County, West Virginia has filed a lawsuit to stop a company called Seneca Technologies from publishing tax maps of the whole state of West Virginia online. The tax assessor is citing a state law that prohibits individuals from copying and redistributing tax maps without the county tax assessor's permission and enables tax assessors to sell paper copies of the maps for $8 each. She asserts that the online maps constitute copyright infringement and have caused her to suffer financial damages.
Seneca Technologies has already battled with the state tax department about the project. Seneca got the maps through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The state tax department tried to force Seneca to pay $8 for each of the 20,936 TIF images (a total of $167,488) and Seneca sued to force the agency to comply with its obligations under the FOIA. The Judge ruled in favor of Seneca, noting that the state law requiring payment applied only to paper maps and not digital copies. The tax department was forced to provide the entire collection of maps for a single payment of $20 to compensate it for the total reproduction costs. Seneca then made the maps freely available online so that they could be accessed by the general public on their website (called FOIAmaps). Seneca plans to use indexing technology to create a search system that makes it easy for users to correlate information from the tax maps with other data stored in Seneca's databases.
Sen. Leahy urges online publication of Founding Fathers’ papers
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is calling for the papers of the Founding Fathers Project to be made available to all Americans through the Internet according to a story in a Vermont newspaper. The Project has been collecting and annotating the papers for 50 years. The project has been criticized for moving too slowly and for costing more than an estimated $60 million in federal and private funding. Leahy's Committee heard testimony from Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough whose access to the papers of John Adams contributed to research for his award-winning biography.
Leahy is quoted in a press release as saying "I support the prompt digitization of all of the Founding Fathers’ Papers, so that this information can be made available to all Americans via the Internet. If Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and Franklin could pipe into this discussion today, we all know that they would ask, “What are you waiting for?” Harnessing the exquisite power of the Internet to preserve and proliferate the Founders’ papers is a marriage made in Heaven. "
“I see a collaborative project!”
I'm going to reprint James' comment from Wednesday on the Michigan digitization project here because I think it merits some serious discussion. There were a series of comments on the way the government documents have been cataloged in the Michigan catalog because the variance in cataloging has caused a lot of the documents to be barred from public viewing "due to copyright":
I see a collaborative project! it'd be great to be proactive on UMich's govt pubs. Rather than having to submit a form when an item is found that should be accessible/in the public domain, wouldn't it be cool if UMich put up a list of all their documents (in a wiki?) and let the community/public have at it to verify "public domainness" of documents. Documents classes could assign reviewing as well. There is precedent for this kind of collaborative project. In 2006, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war (which was later shut down because detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research were available publicly! oops!!). A site called LibriVox has volunteers who read chapters of public domain books, many of which have been digitized by Project Gutenberg.The point is, let's leverage the power of the internet to help get govt information out to the public!As it happens, right after I read James' comment I was in a meeting where I found out about another project occurring at the law school library at Rutgers University. The project, Congressional Documents Online, is a full-text archive of Congressional Hearings and Committee Prints from the Rutgers law library collection. The Law Library is in the process of digitizing its print collection of Congressional documents and the website says that there are "7064 documents available, totalling: 1581950 pages, 238814558897 total bytes, as of: Wed Dec 19 14:47:37 EST 2007". All are freely available online. There's a simple search box and a browseable list of the documents. Continue reading
The Real ID Act threatens religious minorities
CNET news has an interesting article about how the Real ID Act, a federal law that takes effect on May 11, will cause problems for Americans who object to facial photograph requirements on religious grounds. The lengthy new regulations released by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as a result of Real ID set minimum standards for state-issued driver's licenses and IDs, among which is a "full facial digital photograph" that adheres to specific federal requirements. Religious groups including some Amish, Old Order Mennonites, Muslims, members of Native American faiths, and fundamentalist Christians object to identification cards bearing their photographs. The article includes an interactive map of the US that lets you check how your state's ID complies with the federal law.
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