Big News – Oregon

From Tim Stanley’s Justia blog:

“Oregon’s Legislative Counsel Committee had a meeting this morning to discuss the copyright claim on the Oregon Revised Statutes. After taking legal counsel from Dexter Johnson, talking with Karl Olson, Carl Malamud, three Oregon citizens and myself, they unanimously voted to not to enforce any copyright claims on the Oregon Revised Statutes. This great!!!”

And, I just read this on BoingBoing:

“Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

“Justia and Public.Resource.Org were invited, along with Karl Olson our counsel, to testify before the Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee. We were joined by a public panel of wikipedians and open source advocates.”

“The process was incredibly well organized. There was a comprehensive briefing packet prepared for the committee, the members asked lots of intelligent questions, and then Dexter Johnson the Legislative Counsel recommended to the committee that they waive assertion of copyright on their statutes. The Majority Leader placed the motion, the President of the Senate called the vote, and the vote was unanimous. This was democracy in action and was great to watch.”

10 Essential Web Sites for Litigators

Genie Tyburski at The Virtual Chase has put together this great list, and we’re pleased and delighted to see Justia listed as a “top 10″ web site for litigators.

Justia: Relatively new to the legal Web scene, Justia deserves mention for several reasons. It stands alone in offering a free keyword-searchable database of federal district court filings. You will find court opinions from 2004 to present as well as other filings. (See also: Free Case Law Databases)

Other offerings worthy of special mention include a database of federal appellate court opinions, RSS feeds for monitoring civil court filings by the type of lawsuit (Select any available topic and go to the bottom of the page to find the feeds.), RSS feeds for tracking federal regulations, and a blog search engine for law-related blogs.

 

 

The State of the State of Oregon

No, not Tuesday’s election.  Over on the Open Case Law Google Group, Carl Malamud has posted this discussion:

For those of you who are interested in the issue of copyright on state statutes, there is some updated information available here:

http://public.resource.org/oregon/

As always, we welcome any efforts to huna kuna the drafts!

Best regards,

Carl