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1.8 million pages of federal case law to become freely available.
Carl Malamud of Public.resource.org has just made yet another startling announcement that should be a boon for legal scholars, information junkies and advocates of free and openly accessible government information. Starting in early 2008, because of the deal the Malamud and his law ninjas at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have struck with Fastcase, Inc., a large swath of federal case law and Supreme Court decisions will be released into the public domain under a Creative Commons license. As the news release states, the 1.8 million pages of law will be integrated into the ongoing public services from organizations such as Columbia University AltLaw a joint project of Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology, and the Silicon Flatirons Program at the University of Colorado Law School) and Cornell School of Law's Legal Information Institute
Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase, Inc. announced today that they will release a large and free archive of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. The archive will be public domain and usable by anyone for any purpose.
“The U.S. judiciary has allowed their entire work product to be locked up behind a cash register,” said Carl Malamud, CEO of Public.Resource.Org. “Law is the operating system of our society and today's agreement means anybody can read the source for a substantial amount of case law that was previously unavailable.”
Fastcase, the leading developer of next-generation American legal research, has agreed to provide Public.Resource.Org with 1.8 million pages of federal case law. This is a marked departure for the online legal research industry, which traditionally has charged expensive subscription fees to access this information.
And what's even cooler is that they're going to wikify it!!
Public.Resource.Org intends to perform an initial transformation on the federal case law archive obtained from Fastcase using open source “star” mapping software, which will allow the insertion of markers that will approximate page breaks based on user-furnished parameters such as page size, margins, and fonts. “Wiki” technology will be used to allow the public to move around these “star” markers, as well as add summaries, classifications, keywords, alternate numbering systems for citation purposes, and ratings or “diggs” on opinions.Continue reading
FedFlix: putting the US Govt’s videos online
Public Domain superhero Carl Malamud has done it again! Public.resource.org has announced a joint venture with the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) (mmmm NTIS documents!!) to digitize their videotapes and deposit them in the Internet Archive. Carl's announcement doesn't say what kind of videotapes NTIS is offering up, but I'm assuming they're coming from NTIS' National Audiovisual Center (NAC) which "contains over 9,000 audiovisual and media productions ... in occupational safety and health, fire services, law enforcement, and foreign languages. Information and educational materials include areas such as history, health, agriculture, and natural resources." I hope Carl can confirm that. And I also hope he'll send us titles/links every month so we can get them into library catalogs and into library users' hands. And I'd like to challenge libraries to catalog anything of interest to your local users that you find in the Archive -- audio, video, text. If Carl can digitize 20 videotapes a month, imagine how many digital items the 60,000 libraries in 112 countries in the OCLC cooperative can catalog. In no time, libraries could catalog the roughly 600,000 items in the Internet Archive (206,890 audio, 104,076 video, 290,269 text). If each OCLC library catalogs 1 item/day, the job will be done in 100 days. So get to it, and thanks again Carl Malamud for being such an inspiration!
"Public.Resource.Org is pleased to announce a joint venture with the U.S. government's National Technical Information Service, a program I've dubbed 'FedFlix.' Each month NTIS will send us 10-20 videotapes, which we'll digitize, then send the tapes back. We'll upload all this public domain data to places like the Internet Archive, and also give the NTIS a digital copy of their data."[Thanks BoingBoing!] Continue reading
Malamud takes on LC Copyright Database
Carl Malamud, FGI's open govt hero, has done it again! In a recent letter to Marybeth Peters, the United States Register of Copyrights, Malamud and others have asked Peters to provide bulk access to a "vital public database" -- the copyright catalog of monographs, documents, and serials. The letter recognizes that "sales of the database may be a significant source of revenue for the Copyright Office" and that "budgetary requirements or the assent of congressional oversight committees" might make it difficult to make the data available right away and offers an short term alternative of "...we would like to offer to set up a collective fund for purchase of a single copy of the database, making it available for anyone to use. This would provide a public distribution channel...." The letter also says, "We ask only that you help us clarify that there is no copyright on the database so that we may freely redistribute it." The letter was signed by the Digital Library Federation, Harvard University Library, Public Knowledge, Stanford University Library, the Association of Research Libraries, the Internet Archive and others. For more see:
The copyright catalog of monographs, documents, and serials is not a product, it is fuel that makes the copyright system work. Anybody should be able to download the entire database to their desktop, write a better search application, or use this public domain information to research copyright questions. A price tag of $86,625 places this database beyond the reach of university libraries, small businesses that wish to provide a better copyright search service, and academics or citizens wishing to analyze the copyright registration process. Additionally, setting copyright restrictions on the copyright database, a “work of the United States Government,†runs directly counter to the well-established principle that such works shall be in the public domain.I hope LC and the Copyright Office take this letter seriously and releases the database to the original owner, the public. However, I am not sure whether Ms. Peters will be amenable considering the post about her on BoingBoing a few days ago. Continue reading
Carl Malamud Takes on WestLaw
Carl Malamud (a hero of public access to public information!), who has taken on the SEC, Patents, and Congress and C-Span, is now tackling the 5 million or so pages of federal case law.
- Carl Malamud Takes on WestLaw, by Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Radar (08.19.07)
- In Re: State and Federal Cases and Codes Released by Public.Resource.Org as Test Data README FILE (Aug 17, 2007)
- A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free By John Markoff New York Times (August 20, 2007)
Carl's short-term goal is the creation of an unencumbered full-text repository of the Federal Reporter, the Federal Supplement, and the Federal Appendix. The medium-term goal is the creation of an unencumbered full-text repository of all state and federal cases and codes.
Continue readingMore about Malamud Google Tech Talk
Here is a bit more information about All The Government's Information, Carl Malamud's "Google Tech Talk" (51 min video) May 24, 2006. (See also our post: Carl Malamud on "All The Government's Information").
I urge you to listen to this because there is so much that government information specialists will find interesting. The prepared part of the talk is only about 22 minutes. There is enough technology to make the talk interesting to technologists, but not so much as to make it uninteresting to the non-technologist. Most of the talk is about ideas and how to make them happen, not the technology.
Here are my notes about some interesting parts -- with (very approximate) references to the minute:second time within the video.
The heart of Carl's talk is his description of his new project, The Public Memory Trust (17:11), and its first project, "Washington Bridge" (14:43). The trust has a mission "of building public works projects on the internet." The Washington Bridge project is an attempt to get video from Congressional hearing rooms to the real world and to the internet in real time and to archive the video permanently. His goal is to demonstrate the feasibility and practicality and utility of this kind of service so that it can be taken over and run by others. (This is the same thing he did with SEC data.) He sees training other to do the same thing at the state and local level and replicating the service (48:30). He says that if there is a public proceeding, the public needs to have access to it, now and forever and it needs to be archived.
I find it particularly interesting that Carl's vision is to provide "the data" (i.e., the raw video streams) not just to service providers (such as television networks and Google Video), but also to anyone who might want to "take this data and do something with it." He mentions technology companies that could use huge amounts of video as raw material for their experiments with creating digital signatures, creating metadata automatically, and doing speech to text conversion, but, presumably, "the data" would be available for anyone to use and reuse as they please. At question time someone asks about peer-to-peer and Carl says, "bittorrent service on the entire archive is a no-brainer" (40:25).
Carl says he spoke to Bruce James at GPO about the project and GPO is giving the project a "GPO fellow" position. (18:00 - 20:00) But a key part of Carl's goal is to create a "large public domain archive" -- something that GPO has never explicitly stated that it is willing to do in quite the same way. GPO's model is to hold onto and control access to government information; Carl's model is to distribute it and make it available to others. He notes that "in the long run, I would like to see every library in the country have a peta-byte of disk and a permanent archive of all congressional proceedings." (18:07)
Net-Neutrality comes up briefly (47:00 to 48:30)
Meta-data creation is discussed in several places (e.g. at 25 minutes and 35 minutes).
Carl's slide with links is at http://public.resource.org/google.techtalk.html.
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