Articles Tagged with search

It appears that court opinions in FDSys are being indexed by the search engines now. If you’ll recall, the GPO announced last year that it was importing opinions from some federal courts into its centralized database (FDSys). In theory, this means that users would be able to search across a large collection of government documents that will now include published court opinions.

FDSys now contains opinions from 28 federal courts, including 3 Circuit Courts of Appeal (the 2nd, 8th, and 10th). I am happy to see that these are now indexed by Google, so the opinions will appear among search results when individuals search the web. It’s one step closer to aggregating this information in one central location.

Of course, FDSys is still very limited. It’s only pulling opinions from a few courts, and it doesn’t seem to be up to date. I searched for a case from October (Windsor v. United States), and could not find anything. The GPO announced last year that its funding was cut, so this program may be stalled.

Google and AOL were sued for patent infringement Thursday by New Jersey-based Suffolk Technologies, LLC over their Internet search summary descriptions, or ‘snippets.’

Suffolk’s lawsuit also alleges that AOL and Google are infringing a second patent for an “Internet server and method of controlling an internet server”. The second claim alleges that AOL’s Advertising.com ad platform and Google’s AdSense service each infringe this patent. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District for the Eastern District of Virginia where AOL is based.

Here are more details on the patent lawsuit, and the complaint (below).

The Supreme Court ruled today that the government cannot use warrantless GPS tracking devices because doing so violates a suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights against unwarranted search and seizure.

Writing for the Court, Justice Scalia held:

that the Government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a “search”

in violation of the Fourth Amendment.