Hi Friends,
As many of you know (at least those in the Open Government & Law Groups), Free Public Information Hero Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.org have been working to get state codes, building codes, electrical codes and other state and city codes online for free… sort of a virtual city of free codes.
You can, right now, download these codes here on Public.Resource.org or through the Internet Archive. As a California bonus, you can also download the California Code of Regulations.
Hi Friends,
Oregon’s Legislative Counsel Committee had a meeting this morning to discuss the copyright claim on the Oregon Revised Statutes. After taking legal counsel from Dexter Johnson, talking with Karl Olson, Carl Malamud, three Oregon citizens and myself, they unanimously voted to not to enforce any copyright claims on the Oregon Revised Statutes. This is great!!!
Carl Malamud presents Oregon Senate President Courtney the “Seal of Approval”
Hi Friends,
Dan, Cicely and I flew over Oregon and headed up to LexBlog Country in the great Northwest. We were there to do some interviewing of computer folks… but we also had some fun (Seattle/As game, Vancouver and more :).
Dan and Cicely ran the booth at Western Washington University. We met a lot of great people.
Hi Friends,
Last week, the State of Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee sent Justia a notice of copyright infringement and demand to cease and desist. In its letter, Dexter Johnson, the Legislative Counsel, asked us to remove a copy of the Oregon Revised Statutes stored on our servers (or pay a licensing fee) by April 30, 2008. The letter claimed copyright on many parts of the Oregon Revised Statutes:
[T]he Committee … claim[s] a copyright in the arrangement and subject-matter compilation of Oregon statutory law, the prefatory and explanatory notes, the leadlines and numbering for each statutory section, the tables the index and annotations and such other incidents as are work product of the Committee in the compilation and publication of Oregon law.
Hi Friends,
As public domain information hero Carl Malamud is working on getting case law online and into the public domain (we have helped a bit :). Carl, donors, and the Public.Resource.org team have done a lot and… more to come…
But in addition to case law, Carl has also been working to get other public legal documents online and into the public domain. These documents include the legislative histories of the laws. So this was interesting… it looks like Thomson-West has signed an exclusive agreement with the GAO to have these legislative histories on WestLaw.
Hi Friends,
JDSupra has officially launched and opened its site to the public today. The JDSupra site allows legal professionals to upload legal documents, memos, forms, filings and briefs and share them with the legal community. On the marketing front, lawyers and law firms can have their own detailed profile page that promotes their practice.
Many great organizations and firms have already started contributing documents, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Morrison & Foerster (my former lawyers at my previous company 🙂 and many many others.
Hi Friends,
The team at FastCase has announced the largest free online US case law database at The Public Library of Law at plol.org. The site is GREAT! The database of cases includes all of the Supreme Court cases and US Court of Appeals cases since 1950 (the same data FastCase recently presented to the Legal Commons project) AND US state case law since 1997 for all 50 states in nice standardized searchable, and usable html format for all states (not the random state by state format many other sites have collected the data in).
Hi Friends,
Here comes the Legal Commons.
Carl Malamud and the team at Public.Resource.org with Larry Lessig and the Creative Commons gang got the FastCase deal done and the case law online. The cases include all of the Federal Court of Appeals decisions since 1950, and all of the US Supreme Court decisions.
Hi Friends,
More free case law has come online. PreCYdent has added 300,000 Federal cases to their database at http://www.PreCYdent.com. They have built in some nice community tools for commenting and rating the cases. And they have a new search engine that is focused on the link structure of cases. Bob Ambrogi’s initial take was that it is pretty good. They are calling their site a “true Alpha” and they are taking comments from all interested parties to improve it. I will test it out over the weekend before the Superbowl :).
It will all be and continue to be free. PreCYdent will support the company with advertising sales.
Hi Friends,
Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.org have gotten together with Ed Walters CEO of FastCase and are happy to announce that they will be putting online an archive of US Appeal Court decisions since 1950 and all of the US Supreme Court cases since 1754. Here is their announcement.
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