Another Lawsuit Questions Who Owns The Copyright On Legal Filings
from the fun-with-copyright dept
Last summer, we wrote about a lawsuit in the US where a lawyer was suing LexisNexis and Westlaw for their services offering access to legal filings. At issue was who owned the copyright on those legal filings. Historically, that issue has rarely come up, because there's little commercial interest in the filings by themselves. However, some lawyers are apparently getting upset about other companies collecting and selling access to their filings... even though the reality of the situation is that those aggregators aren't selling the filings, so much as the aggregation of all the filings. No one is ever going to go to a lawyer and offer to pay for a copy of a particular filing. However, it appears similar legal questions are being asked north of the border as well. Michael Geist points us to the news of a class action lawsuit being filed against Thomson Reuters for its service that aggregates legal filings for other lawyers.While I can understand that, technically, legal filings are most likely covered by copyright, I think there should be a clear exemption there. The entire purpose of copyright law is supposed to be to create incentives to create works and share them. But, in the case of legal filings, clearly copyright is not needed as an incentive for either creating the works or for sharing them. It seems preposterous to think that such documents should get copyright protection. Really, this is yet another of the ridiculous consequences of copyright law changes that made any type of work automatically covered by copyright. If there was a system that required registration of copyrights, I doubt many lawyers would be copyrighting their legal filings.
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Filed Under: canada, copyright, legal documents
Companies: thomson reuters
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They're lawyers. Never doubt.
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Re:
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However, you analogy holds if the building is full of maps showing where the copyrighted material is held (that's what an 'aggregator' is - please file this for future reference).
And I believe that would be perfectly legal and non-infringing...
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Re: Sell a building
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Public Record
If someone wants to make a compilation of matters of public record and charge a fee for access to that compilation, there should be no impediment to that, but the records themselves, as with all public documents, should not be subject to any restriction other than those normally required of public documents, i.e., reasonably copying fees, which in the internet age should approach zero.
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No one would file lawsuits if it weren't for copy protection laws!! Wait, that could be a good thing.
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Copyrights in Court Filings
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Fair Use/Research?
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This strikes me as wrong for two reasons. First, confidentiality should be sacrosanct unless both parties agree to waive it. Second, most of the licenses I have prepared are crafted specifically to fit the fact situation at hand, and there are in most instances underlying facts that determine what is and what is not appropriater why certain clauses are drafted and the reason they are drafted in a particular manner.
Would I ever sue? Of course not. That is the prerogative of the parties. It does irritate me, however, at the though that a so-called professional "colleague" would copy such a document so slavishly that the resulting document may represent a clear case of "malpractice". Clients deserve professional representation from a competent lawyer, and practices such as these remove competency from what clients have every right to expect.
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If attorney A spends 30 hours drafting an original brief, and attorney B can offer similar competing services for 1/3 the price by simply copying attorney A's brief and adapting it to the facts of his case, then there is significantly less incentive to draft original briefs (as opposed to simply lifting others' briefs to the maximum extent possible).
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I wonder
It is a slippery slope, we are not talking about music or movies here. Most people sometime in their live need legal professionals and they should not be represented based on broader market.
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Re: I wonder
While there is a possibility that some attorney might see some potential profit from a legal doc drafted for a client that would come from another source, the likelihood is slim in almost all cases, and in almost all cases would be far outweighed by the real, immediate interest in pleasing and doing a good job for the client.
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Might not CopyLeft give protection for lawyers who want it?
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Dumb Lawsuit – Defining “Public Domain”
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