Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

I'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.

This 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 cases linked to the official transcript, but seemingly none of the parties involved finds it in their interest to make that work.

Something 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 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.

The title appears to be somewhat misleading.

The counter claim by the government is that this isn't "the source of truth" being deleted but rather a subset presented more accessibly by a third party (CourtsDesk) which has allegedly breached privacy rules and the service agreement by passing sensitive info to an AI service.

Coverage of the "urgent question" in parliament on the subject here:

House of Commons, Courtsdesk Data Platform Urgent Question

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002rg00

No 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?