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Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

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Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#21

Post by chaps »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #17
chaps wrote: post #8

I do a lot of IL criminal courts research and it's really, really fucking bad out there. Transcripts: Multiple dollars per pages. Want that expedited? Multiply that amount by four. Don't know the court date? Can't get your transcript. Clerks put in the wrong date? Tough luck. Payment for those transcripts? Over Zelle because the court reporters themselves are contractors and get paid independently. FOIA: IL Judicial…

Consider reaching out to https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/ if any headway can be made legally on these scenarios. They are aggressive, highly recommend. If the legal scaffolding exists to enable FOIA requests, https://www.muckrock.com/ can then do the rest.

Great recs.

Reclaim the Records and I do a loooot of the same work but it's separate enough that we don't really interact much. But I'm a big, big fan of their work and have had a couple light chats with the founder a couple times. She's great and yeah, wonderfully aggressive. Her work's the sort of foundational work that enables so much.

Muckrock and I go back quite a long way! Sending about 200 requests through them later this month :)

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#22

Post by chaps »

jandrese wrote: post #20
chaps wrote: post #8

I do a lot of IL criminal courts research and it's really, really fucking bad out there. Transcripts: Multiple dollars per pages. Want that expedited? Multiply that amount by four. Don't know the court date? Can't get your transcript. Clerks put in the wrong date? Tough luck. Payment for those transcripts? Over Zelle because the court reporters themselves are contractors and get paid independently. FOIA: IL Judicial…

> Transcripts: Multiple dollars per pages. Want that expedited? Multiply that amount by four. Don't know the court date? Can't get your transcript. Clerks put in the wrong date? Tough luck. Payment for those transcripts? Over Zelle because the court reporters themselves are contractors and get paid independently. Is this because a person has to literally transcribe the stenographer's notes into plain English? Is it e…

Yes and yes. I'm sure there's historical or possibly ethical reasons for it being this way, but I don't understand why it's not the clerk of court's job. Something to figure out!

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#23

Post by akudha »

atlanta90210 wrote: post #15

The state of Georgia tried to copyright its public written laws. They lost. https://www.bfvlaw.com/supreme-court-rules-georgia-cannot-cl...

How does one decide what should be in the public domain for the good of society and what should be commercialized? These are a couple of examples that I learned recently

1. In the UK, Royal Mail owns the postal addresses data. I was looking at UK's open datasets - apparently lot of datasets that have addresses can't be used without paying Royal Mail. There are some exceptions - but I am no lawyer. It is depressing to learn that Royal Mail is no longer a public institution, it was sold against public will by the UK government to a private entity, and sold again and as of last year it is owned by a Czech billionaire. Similarly, Canadian postal code database is also not free.

2. CPT code descriptions are owned by AMA (apparently they're super litigious?). Sure they took the time to write them, they should be compensated - but imagine how many interesting projects can be built if this data was freely available

On one hand, multi Billion dollar companies like Bloomberg exist, thanks to free and open data. But also things that should be free (dictionaries, postal codes etc) aren't.

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#24

Post by toomuchtodo »

chaps wrote: post #21
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider reaching out to https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/ if any headway can be made legally on these scenarios. They are aggressive, highly recommend. If the legal scaffolding exists to enable FOIA requests, https://www.muckrock.com/ can then do the rest.

Great recs. Reclaim the Records and I do a loooot of the same work but it's separate enough that we don't really interact much. But I'm a big, big fan of their work and have had a couple light chats with the founder a couple times. She's great and yeah, wonderfully aggressive. Her work's the sort of foundational work that enables so much. Muckrock and I go back quite a long way! Sending about 200 requests through the…

I'll tip my hand a bit, I suggested Reclaim the Records because while I am time poor, if they take up fighting anything you suggested, I can send a directed donation towards that work. If you have someone else in mind who will take on these legal challenges in Illinois, I am interested.

Love the Muckrock love, they are a treasure.

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#25

Post by crazygringo »

atlanta90210 wrote: post #15

The state of Georgia tried to copyright its public written laws. They lost. https://www.bfvlaw.com/supreme-court-rules-georgia-cannot-cl...

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make?

First, laws cannot be copyrighted. They're in the public domain.

Second, the case you link to was not about laws, but annotated law. The annotated version (OCGA) was written by LexisNexis, and all that work paid for by LexisNexis. Obviously, normally that would mean LexisNexis has the copyright on the annotations. This is unproblematic.

Another organization (Public.Resource.Org) posted the OCGA online. Georgia sued, arguing the annotations were the work of LexisNexis and therefore obviously copyrighted. But the problem was that Georgia had declared the annotations to be official.

The Supreme Court found this act of making them official made them essentially the law itself, and therefore uncopyrightable. Which meant LexisNexis had done all that expensive work for free, whoops.

So it's a weird edge case where Georgia should either not have accorded any special status to the annotations, or should have paid for annotations themselves if they wanted "official" ones, and made them public domain.

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#26

Post by [deleted] »

akudha wrote: post #23
atlanta90210 wrote: post #15

The state of Georgia tried to copyright its public written laws. They lost. https://www.bfvlaw.com/supreme-court-rules-georgia-cannot-cl...

How does one decide what should be in the public domain for the good of society and what should be commercialized? These are a couple of examples that I learned recently 1. In the UK, Royal Mail owns the postal addresses data. I was looking at UK's open datasets - apparently lot of datasets that have addresses can't be used without paying Royal Mail. There are some exceptions - but I am no lawyer. It is depressing to…

[deleted]

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#27

Post by chaps »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #24
chaps wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great recs. Reclaim the Records and I do a loooot of the same work but it's separate enough that we don't really interact much. But I'm a big, big fan of their work and have had a couple light chats with the founder a couple times. She's great and yeah, wonderfully aggressive. Her work's the sort of foundational work that enables so much. Muckrock and I go back quite a long way! Sending about 200 requests through the…

I'll tip my hand a bit, I suggested Reclaim the Records because while I am time poor, if they take up fighting anything you suggested, I can send a directed donation towards that work. If you have someone else in mind who will take on these legal challenges in Illinois, I am interested. Love the Muckrock love, they are a treasure.

Nice, thank you. It's really appreciated. For Chicagoland:

Lucy Parsons Labs: https://www.lucyparsonslabs.com/donate

Chicago Appleseed: https://www.chicagoappleseed.org/ways-to-give/

Invisible Institute: https://invisible.institute/donate

Unraveled Press: https://unraveledpress.com/support-unraveled/

All four are great. One is my employer. Unraveled Press would benefit the most from donations.

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#28

Post by showerst »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #19
showerst wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither openlaws nor public.resource actually let you just pull the laws in a common format (or the scrapers) as far as I can tell? I was thinking something more along the lines of a git repo per state.

Who will maintain the git repo per state [1] [2]? There is value in a pipeline that continually ingests this data from various sources and pushes it into the Internet Archive, but if you wish to treat it as authoritative, it must have a human minding it, because of entropy and decay. Even the Python Software Foundation has a budget of ~$5M/year. Hence my openlaws.us example. If it was as easy as writing a scraper and…

I know a thing or two about that, 2,400 commits to the scrapers powering openstates over the past 9 years.

Even with openstates, we have an API but don't "just" dump the bills to git for legacy nerd reasons.

The nice thing about laws is that the host websites (or PDFs) don't change templates _that_ often, so generally you can rescrape quarterly (or in some states, annually) without a ton of maintenance. With administrative codes you need to scrape more often, but the websites are still pretty stable.

The downside is that codes in particular are often big, so a single scrape might need to make 20,000 or more requests, so you have to be very careful about rate limiting and proxies, which goes to my original point that it sucks that accessing this stuff is such a mess.

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#29

Post by esbranson »

If you're trying to fix anything relating to public policy, politics, &c., without fixing this you are wasting your time. You will make a bigger difference adopting a local stretch of highway and picking up litter. It is maddening to see generation after generation learn this the hard way.

FLP's CourtListener RECAP hits hard, but it has no counterparts either worldwide or within the US. If it goes offline, democracy and rule of law across the entire world go offline with it. Federal statutes and regulations are a very small part of black letter law.

Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

#30

Post by TZubiri »

"The fees the federal government charges for court documents are significant. PACER charges users $0.10 for every page users search and access, and $30 per name or item searched plus $0.10 per page per document per month, albeit with a max of $3 per individual document."

It's funny how these numbers sound very reasonable on their face, especially if used for human review.

But if you consider programmatic searches, 10 cents per page is a lot. Consider the CPU cost of cycling through each pdf, assume 1000 letters, that's 1Khz which is like a billionth of a cent, in terms of electricity and hardware ammortization.

I'd bet that this incentivizes a 'hoarding' and reuse of information, rather than a "query when necessary" practice, which would in fact give place to monopolies like OP argues.

A newcomer legal analysis company would have to pay, say 200$ for research from their first customer. If they save those documents, then it is unlikely that their second customer will benefit from those documents.

However huge firms would make a business out of the byproduct of searches, they spend 200$ on documents, and they serve a client, but they add those documents to their own internal database, which of course has costs much lower than the nominal fees stipulated by the federal steward (PACER).

An argument could be that you can't eliminate the fees because there's costs that need to be paid. But isn't that what taxes are typically for? Especially corporate income tax. The costs are probably a nominal fee to avoid overbearing systems, similar to franchise taxes and incorporation clerical fees.

I don't think the idea of charging for documents is bad, who said that the system would need to be adopted for huge data hungry systems, I'm all for giving human analysis an advantage instead of adapting systems to play into the data munching AI fad. I'd rather see balancing that rewards human analysis rather than bringing data munching to the masses.

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