Daily Archives: February 9, 2010

Article: Enabling Free On-line Access to UK Law Reports: The Copyright Problem

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Enabling Free On-line Access to UK Law Reports: The Copyright Problem

Philip Leith and Cynthia Fellows

18 International Journal of Law & Information Technology   72 (Spring 2010)

Abstract

The history of publishing legal decisions (law reporting) in the UK has been that of a privatised system since its inception, and that history has encompassed several hundred years. The privatised nature of this has meant that the product (the law report) has been, except in limited cases, viewed as the property of the publisher, rather than the property of the court or public. BAILII is an open access legal database that came about in part because of the copyrighted, privatised nature of this legal information.

In this paper, we will outline the problem of access to pre-2000 judgments in the UK and consider whether there are legal or other remedies which might enable BAILII to both develop a richer historic database and also to work in harmony, rather than in competition, with legal publishers. We argue that public access to case law is an essential requirement in a democratic common law system, and that BAILII should be seen as a potential step towards a National Law Library.

Sudan Laws Online

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Sudan Laws Online is a database that offers a selection of  full-text Sudenese statutes. All documents and the search interface are in Arabic. The Web site also includes news and some commentary. The database has free materials and also subscription content.

Sudan Laws Online

http://www.sudanlaws.net

To access the statutes click on

قوانين السودان.

Sample Laws available:

Criminal Code

Code of Civil Procedure

Code of Crminal Procedure

Civil Transactions Law

Evidence Act

 Labor Relations Act

Code, Access to Knowledge and the Law: The Governance of Knowledge in the Digital Age

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“Code, Access to Knowledge and the Law: The Governance of Knowledge in the Digital Age“

by Antonios G. Broumas, University of Athens

Abstract:
“This paper endeavours to clarify the role of technology in the governance of knowledge in the networked information society. Its central argument is that modern technologies of control, deployed as they are by powerful actors, tend to indiscriminately exclude access to knowledge, and, as a result, impede the dramatic potential of the digital age. In the process of underpinning the above thesis, the patterns of interrelation between code and the law and their influence on the networked information society are examined. It is argued that the existing equilibrium between control and A2K is disproportionately disposed toward specific private interests, originating primarily from powerful market players of traditional industrial sectors, while generally disregarding other private interests, or indeed the interest of the public as a whole. The paper concludes by calling for more equitable and balanced equilibria between control and A2K, implemented in a model of governance more clearly orientated towards social and economic development.”

Source: Legal Information & Technology Abstracts, Vol. 2, No. 4 (2/9/2010)



Will Knowledge and People Converge?

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In today’s HuffPo, Paul Lippe (Legal OnRamp founder) interviews David Curle (legal information market analyst) in “Will Knowledge & People Converge?”

The interview moves through key trends and recent history in the legal information and publishing sector (including the latest improvements offered by the ‘big guys’ at Westlaw and Lexis).

Then the discussion shifts to the impact of Google Scholar‘s free case law on the legal information market:

“It’s revolutionary in the sense that the general public now has easy access to the law of the land, something that was surprisingly hard to obtain before.”

Curle mentions the FastCase iPhone app that allows free searching of its database.   The days of charging for ‘just access’ to primary legal materials are coming to a close.    And, welcome to the generation of data.gov and law.gov:

“Law.gov has the ambition of making all primary US legal material available in standardized, machine-readable formats that can be incorporated into new kinds of information products.”

. . . .

“open access to legal sources will spur the creation of new markets for legal information among consumers, and even more so among non-lawyer professionals who need to understand a narrow field of that they work with all the time. Expect to see new products and services built on top of the free legal information that will make the law more accessible to those new markets.”

And, speaking of new products building on free content.  Curle moves on to discuss SpindleLaw.

“They are building, in a kind of collaborative, Wiki-like way, a database of the legal rules that lawyers find in court decisions and in legislation. Their idea is that it’s pretty inefficient to get to those rules by searching and reading long court opinions. They are extracting and organizing the rules with links to the legal sources. They have a long way to go to prove that the concept works, but I like the way they are trying to turn the research process on its head.”

These are very interesting times.