Harvard Law Launches Project To Put Every Court Decision Online For Free

from the nicely-done dept

On Thursday, Harvard Law School announced its Free the Law project, teaming up with a company called Ravel to scan all federal court decisions and all state court decisions, and then place them all online for free. This is pretty huge. While some courts now release most decisions as freely available PDFs, many federal courts still have them hidden behind the ridiculous PACER system, and state court decisions are totally hit or miss. And, of course, tons of historical cases are completely buried. While there are some giant companies like Westlaw and LexisNexis that provide lawyers access to decisions, those cost a ton -- and the public is left out. This new project is designed to give much more widespread access to the public. And it sounds like they're really going above and beyond to make it truly accessible, rather than just dumping PDFs online:

The cases will be accessible in a searchable format and, along with the texts, they will be presented with visual maps developed by the company, which graphically show the evolution through cases of a judicial concept and how each key decision is cited in others.

Ravel is a private company, which is paying for the scanning, but Harvard appears to have structured things in a pretty reasonable manner. Harvard "owns" the resulting data (assuming what's ownable), and while there are some initial restrictions that Ravel can put on the corpus of data, that goes away entirely after eight years, and can end earlier if Ravel "does not meet its obligations." Beyond that, Harvard is making everything available to non-profits and researchers anyway. Ravel is apparently looking to make some money by providing advanced tools for sifting through the database, even if the content itself will be freely available.

All in all, this looks like a useful and worthwhile project -- one that the federal and state governments should have already done on their own, but... Now if we can just open up PACER finally....

Filed Under: case law, court rulings, free online, free the law
Companies: harvard, ravel

New Content Industry Talking Point: Fair Use Is Bad Because It Leads To Litigation

from the say-what?!? dept

While we were initially skeptical of a planned review of copyright law in the UK (after all, it had been done just five years earlier, with most of the key points then ignored by the government), we were encouraged by some of the folks who were included as a part of the process. However, it looks like, once again, politics may have gotten in the way. We had laughed at the ridiculous claims from the UK copyright industry folks that fair use was bad and would put a "chokehold on innovation." After all, we have fair use in the US, and we've seen no evidence that fair use holds back innovation in any way, shape, or form.

And yet, as the report is about to come out, reports are leaking that the committee has decided not to support an American-style fair use law in the UK. The suggestion is that they bought the ridiculous claim from the entertainment industry that fair use is a problem because it leads to a lot of lawsuits:

According to sources close to the review, the panel decided fair use would be too problematic to replicate from scratch in UK law because it emerged from a number of US case law precedents. Fair use, which is employed as a defence against infringement claims in the US, has also given rise to a high volume of litigation.

Frankly, this makes no sense (at all), unless there's a lot more to it. Yes, fair use in the US developed through case law, and was then codified in 1976. And, yes, there has been additional case law on the matter since, but the UK now has all of that case law to look at, and it's entirely possible to write smarter fair use laws today. You can't just throw up your hands and say because it developed out of case law in the US that it leads to too much litigation. The proper response is to better define the contours of fair use, such that there need not be as much litigation. Tragically, that appears to be unlikely this time around.

Filed Under: case law, copyright, fair use, uk