Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity » Lexis http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman The ways law rules creative endeavors and the ways law itself is a creative endeavor Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:19:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 The music industry, book publishing, and now Lexis and Westlaw? http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman/2010/02/the-music-industry-book-publishing-and-now-lexis-and-westlaw/ http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman/2010/02/the-music-industry-book-publishing-and-now-lexis-and-westlaw/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:54:31 +0000 pfriedman http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman/?p=3054  Read more]]> Our technological revolution is taking down the music industry as its operated for the last 80 years or so, the book industry as its operated for the last 150 years or so, and now there are plenty of people who think that internet in general and Google Scholar in particular will take down the online legal research regime that has only existed since a couple of years before I started law school in 1981 — Stephen E. Arnold writes:

What is the financial outlook for the LexisNexis-type and Westlaw-type firms? Short term there won’t be much change. Over time, life gets tougher. I do quite a bit of work in online information, and I am not sure these outfits can adapt to the Google’s legal push.

]]> http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman/2010/02/the-music-industry-book-publishing-and-now-lexis-and-westlaw/feed/ 0 The inexorable trend toward free access to court documents http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman/2009/12/the-inexorable-trend-toward-free-access-to-court-documents/ http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman/2009/12/the-inexorable-trend-toward-free-access-to-court-documents/#comments Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:43:18 +0000 pfriedman http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman/?p=2937  Read more]]> I mentioned last week that Google Scholar can now be used to find case law. It’s real progress.Court documents, after all, are public documents, so it sometimes seems a bit frustrating that the only reliable way to do legal research is through private systems. As Wired’s Threat Level explains, “West [Publishing], and its competitor, Lexis Nexis, buy court data in bulk, reformat it and add proprietary citation codes. They then license the database of public documents at high rates to libraries, law firms and government agencies. Even the U.S. Court system pays West’s high license fees to access public court documents that West purchased from it.”

To make matters worse, the court system’s database, PACER, doesn’t work well: “the search function is intricate and inflexible, and lacks a way for users to be notified when a case is updated. And in the age of Google, it is absurd to charge citizens to search for the name of a person in a lawsuit. Even looking at the docket sheet — a short form list of all actions in a given case — costs $.08 a page.”

The ability to copy and disseminate documents instantaneously, of course, is breaking this system down.  In addition to Google Scholar, a “Firefox plug-in called RECAP, created by Princeton students, uploads court documents to a public archive any time a user goes into th e system, while programmer Aaron Swartz took advantage of a pilot program offering free access to download 18 million court documents (that earned him an FBI investigation).”

I’ve got mixed feelings about court dockets in their entirety being freely available via the internet (as opposed to, say, the documents courts themselves produce). Dissemination of documents produced without thought to a worldwide audience can cause serious misunderstandings. But technology and economics seem to be inexorable forces — just ask the music industry: try as it might, it isn’t going to recreate a world in which it held a monopoly on the ability to produce and distribute recorded music. And it’s probably better after all that the public gets for free the court documents it produces.

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