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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

#51

Post by tchalla »

londons_explore wrote: post #18
nonethewiser wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> Open is open.

I’d then ask OpenAI to be open too since open is open.

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

#52

Post by RobotToaster »

criddell wrote: post #43
spacebanana7 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The names of minors should never be released in public (with a handful of exceptions). But why shouldn't a 19 year old shoplifter have that on their public record? Would you prevent newspapers from reporting on it, or stop users posting about it on public forums?

Would you want the first thing to show up after somebody googles your name to be an accusation for improper conduct around a child? In theory, people could dig deeper and find out you won in court and were acquitted, but people here should know that nobody ever reads the article...

If it was reported in a newspaper then that would likely already be the case.

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

#53

Post by tchalla »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #38

Better overview of what the complaint was here: https://www.tremark.co.uk/moj-orders-deletion-of-courtsdesk-... They raise the interesting point that "publicly available" doesn't necessarily mean its free to store/process etc: > One important distinction is that “publicly available” does not automatically mean “free to collect, combine, republish and retain indefinitely” in a searchable archive. Court lists and regis…

I can’t believe that this even needs to be said. There are plenty of things which are publicly available but not free to share and definitely not allowed to be made money of.

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

#54

Post by dgxyz »

londons_explore wrote: post #6

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 s…

Yes. This should be held by the London Archives in theory with the rest of the paper records of that sort.

They have ability to seal documents until set dates and deal with digital archival and retrieval.

I suspect some of this is it's a complete shit show and they want to bury it quickly or avoid having to pay up for an expensive vendor migration.

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

#55

Post by spacebanana7 »

criddell wrote: post #43
spacebanana7 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The names of minors should never be released in public (with a handful of exceptions). But why shouldn't a 19 year old shoplifter have that on their public record? Would you prevent newspapers from reporting on it, or stop users posting about it on public forums?

Would you want the first thing to show up after somebody googles your name to be an accusation for improper conduct around a child? In theory, people could dig deeper and find out you won in court and were acquitted, but people here should know that nobody ever reads the article...

If you were hiring a childminder for your kids, would you want to know that they had 6 accusations for improper conduct around children in 6 different court cases - even if those were all acquittals?

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

#56

Post by alberto467 »

nonethewiser wrote: post #9
londons_explore wrote: post #6

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 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?

The issue with that is people can then flood everything with huge piles of documents, which is bad enough if it's all clean OCR'd digital data that you can quickly download in its entirety, but if you're stuck having to wait between downloading documents, you'll never find out what they don't want you to find out.

It's like having you search through sand, it's bad enough while you can use a sift, but then they tell you that you can only use your bare hands, and your search efforts are made useless.

This is not a new tactic btw and pretty relevant to recent events...

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

#57

Post by FunHearing3443 »

londons_explore wrote: post #41
whizzter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open to research yes. Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks. AI firms have shown themselves to be playing fast and loose with copyrighted works, a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years.

"court records are public forever" and "records of crimes expunged after X years" are incompatible. Instead, we should make it illegal to discriminate based on criminal conviction history. Just like it is currently illegal to discriminate based on race or religion. That data should not be illegal to know, but illegal to use to make most decisions relating to that person.

Curious, why should conviction history not be a factor? I could see the argument that previous convictions could indicate a lack of commitment to no longer committing crimes.

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

#58

Post by SoftTalker »

londons_explore wrote: post #41
whizzter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open to research yes. Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks. AI firms have shown themselves to be playing fast and loose with copyrighted works, a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years.

"court records are public forever" and "records of crimes expunged after X years" are incompatible. Instead, we should make it illegal to discriminate based on criminal conviction history. Just like it is currently illegal to discriminate based on race or religion. That data should not be illegal to know, but illegal to use to make most decisions relating to that person.

Problem is it's very hard to prove what factors were used in a decision. Person A has a minor criminal record, person B does not? You can just say "B was more qualified" and as long as there's some halfway credible basis for that nothing can really be done. Only if one can demonstrate a clear pattern of behavior might a claim of discrimination go anywhere.

If a conviction is something minor enough that might be expungable, it should be private until that time comes. If the convicted person hasn't met the conditions for expungement, make it part of the public record, otherwise delete all history of it.

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

#59

Post by alberto467 »

tchalla wrote: post #50
spacebanana7 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The names of minors should never be released in public (with a handful of exceptions). But why shouldn't a 19 year old shoplifter have that on their public record? Would you prevent newspapers from reporting on it, or stop users posting about it on public forums?

> Would you prevent newspapers from reporting on it, or stop users posting about it on public forums? Yes

It is the UK we're talking about after all...

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

#60

Post by DharmaPolice »

whizzter wrote: post #21
londons_explore wrote: post #6

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 s…

Open to research yes. Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks. AI firms have shown themselves to be playing fast and loose with copyrighted works, a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years.

Records of cases involving children are already excluded so that's not a relevant risk.
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