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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

#71

Post by matthewdgreen »

crazygringo wrote: post #25
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.Resou…

It’s not a weird edge case at all. For many specific areas like building codes, states have long delegated publication and “annotation” (essentially, writing down critical elements of the law that must be known to folks who want to obey the law) to private publishers. This isn’t literally “Georgia tried to copyright its laws” but it’s close enough to be morally the same. I remember being incensed about this in the late 1990s and I’m glad the wheel of justice (finally) turned.

ETA: A critical tell here are the words “The State of Georgia sued.” Georgia essentially tried to copyright its laws by having a private firm do the copyrighting, and they didn’t even make much effort to hide behind this fiction, since they were the plaintiff. Kudos to the courts for seeing past this low-effort obfuscation.

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

#72

Post by FireBeyond »

bicepjai wrote: post #41

Its crazy insane that citizens who are expected to follow the law cannot have access to law ? what does that even mean ? Do we at-least know some high level numbers on how many law/opinions/cases texts are not freely available to citizens ?

Tangentially the State of Florida will charge you $75/day for your time in jail, regardless of whether you were found not guilty, the case was dismissed or charges dropped completely.

And not paying those fees is a second degree felony.

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

#73

Post by singleshot_ »

mothballed wrote: post #51
singleshot_ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is probaly embedded within the concept of codification of acts. Legislatures pass acts, which are kind of like diffs for statutory law. But there is no base document, just a series of diffs from the beginning. Somewhere along the way, someone did a lot of work to “codify” the law, and when you go look up 18 USC 1001, and then click “next,” you are taking advantage of the codification process. But the perso…

I would argue it does matter because the public has to know all the law as ignorance of the law is no excuse. If Westlaw is limited or an unreasonable monetary burden on the populace (or possibly, depending on your argument, costs anything at all) then the argument kind of evaporates of how you can prosecute someone, because an essential part of law is that the party under criminal penalty must be put under clear not…

> argument kind of evaporates of how you can prosecute someone, because an essential part of law is that the party under criminal penalty must be put under clear notice of what is illegal.

I reckon that’s why the sixth amendment exists but if you want to make a free PACER, go for it.

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

#74

Post by burner420042 »

yxhuvud wrote: post #34
burner420042 wrote: post #33

If someone wanted to do business research for Mexico or any other LATAM country, while in the US and using English source data what resources would you look to?

Depends on what kind of business research you need. But there are at least collections of all tax treaties that exist available from a single source somewhere. I don't remember what the source is off the top of my head unfortunately.

Thank you. If it ever comes to you please let me know.

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

#75

Post by gopher_space »

showerst wrote: post #28
toomuchtodo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 administ…

The assessor's office in my county provides data older than two weeks (iirc) as a few sql export dumps because that's how things were done back in the day.

Current information is gated behind a web2.0 view of their live data with severe limits. It wasn't designed to be scraped and is in fact hostile to the attempt. I'd imagine they're seeing rising hosting costs and that they'll keep rising.

I should reach out to them and see what this looks like from their angle. The local commercial real estate community is pretty tech-savvy and I'm wondering if we could all be a bit more proactive around data access.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on county vs state vs national data! I'd be very interested in any bandwidth usage or processing requirement info you might have recorded.

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

#76

Post by 15155 »

TZubiri wrote: post #30

"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…

> 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

This is intentionally misleading and obviously wrong for anyone who has ever used PACER. If you have the PACER Service Center execute the search for you - a human being - it costs $30. If you use the web interface, the rates are extremely low, and citizens are given $30/quarter in credit to use.

https://www.uscourts.gov/court-programs/fees/electronic-publ...

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