Digital access to UK court records was already abysmal. And we're somehow going even further backwards. At least in the US you have initiatives like https://www.courtlistener.com/.
Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
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Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
#12FYI, apparently there was a data breach, but it would seem better to fix the issue and continue with this public service than to just shut it down completely. Here is the Journalist organization in the UK responding:
"The government has cited a significant data protection breach as the reason for its decision - an issue it clearly has a duty to take seriously."
https://www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj-responds-to-order-for-th...
Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
#13I've looked into the Courtdesk service. It's a stream of events from the courts, as they happen. They claim up to 12,000 updates in a 24 period, aggregated, filtered and organised. While court judgements are public, I don't know if the information Courtdesk provides is. This is a worrying direction.
If the sources of these event data are not public, your worry would be understandable. But if not public, what are these sources then?
Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
#14Along with the attempt to prevent jury trials for all but the most serious criminal cases, this is beginning to look like an attempt to prevent reporting on an upcoming case. I can think of one happening in April, involving the prime minister. Given he was head of the CPS for 5 years, would know exactly which levers to pull.
Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
#15No right to free speech. Then they start jailing people for posts. Then they get rid of juries. Then they get rid of public records. What are they trying to hide?
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Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
#16This is odd; this is supposed to be public information, isn't it? I suspect it's run into bureaucratic empire-defending rather than a nefarious scheme to conceal cases. Relatedly, there's an extremely good online archive of important cases in the past, but because they disallow crawlers in robots.txt: https://www.bailii.org/robots.txt not many people know about it. Personally I would prefer if all reporting on legal…
bureaucratic empire-defending is nefarious.
Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
#17FYI, apparently there was a data breach, but it would seem better to fix the issue and continue with this public service than to just shut it down completely. Here is the Journalist organization in the UK responding: "The government has cited a significant data protection breach as the reason for its decision - an issue it clearly has a duty to take seriously." https://www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj-responds-to-order-fo…
That's the dumbest possible response to this.
Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
#18Something is either public record - in which case it should be on a government website for free, and the AI companies should be free to scrape to their hearts desire... Or it should be sealed for X years and then public record. Where X might be 1 in cases where you don't want to hurt an ongoing investigation, or 100 if it's someone's private affairs. Nothing that goes through the courts should be sealed forever. We s…
>We should give up with the idea of databases which are 'open' to the public, but you have to pay to access, reproduction isn't allowed, records cost pounds per page, and bulk scraping is denied. That isn't open. How about rate limited?
No. Open is open. Beyond DDoS protections, there should be no limits.
If load on the server is a concern, make the whole database available as a torrent. People who run scrapers tend to prefer that anyway.
This isn't someone's hobby project run from a $5 VPS - they can afford to serve 10k qps of readonly data if needed, and it would cost far less than the salary of 1 staff member.
Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
#19Something is either public record - in which case it should be on a government website for free, and the AI companies should be free to scrape to their hearts desire... Or it should be sealed for X years and then public record. Where X might be 1 in cases where you don't want to hurt an ongoing investigation, or 100 if it's someone's private affairs. Nothing that goes through the courts should be sealed forever. We s…
>We should give up with the idea of databases which are 'open' to the public, but you have to pay to access, reproduction isn't allowed, records cost pounds per page, and bulk scraping is denied. That isn't open. How about rate limited?
If the rate limit is reasonable (allows full download of the entire set of data within a feasible time-frame), that could be acceptable. Otherwise, no.
Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
#20Okay, then we need to distribute the database as torrent. Maybe Anna's Archive can help.