Leith & Fellows, Enabling Free On-line Access to UK Law Reports: The Copyright Problem

Professor Philip Leith of Queen’s University of Belfast School of Law, and Cynthia Fellows of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, have published Enabling Free On-line Access to UK Law Reports: The Copyright Problem, forthcoming in the International Journal of Law and Information Technology. Here is the 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.”

Sartor on Legal Concepts as Inferential Nodes & Ontological Categories

Dr. Giovanni Sartor of the European University Institute Department of Law has published Legal Concepts as Inferential Nodes & Ontological Categories in the September 2009 issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law. Earlier versions of this article are available on SSRN here and here. Here is the abstract:

“I shall compare two views of legal concepts: as nodes in inferential nets and as categories in an ontology (a conceptual architecture). Firstly, I shall introduce the inferential approach, consider its implications, and distinguish the mere possession of an inferentially defined concept from the belief in the concept’s applicability, which also involves the acceptance of the concept’s constitutive inferences. For making this distinction, the inferential and eliminative analysis of legal concepts proposed by Alf Ross will be connected to the views on theoretical concepts in science advanced by Frank Ramsey and Rudolf Carnap. Consequently, the mere comprehension of a legal concept will be distinguished from the application of the concept to a particular legal system, since application presupposes a doctrinal commitment, namely, the belief that the inferences constituting the concept hold in that system. Then, I shall consider how concepts can be characterised by defining the corresponding terms and placing them within an ontology. Finally, I shall argue that there is a tension between the inferential and the ontological approach, but that both need to be taken into account, to capture the meaning and the cognitive function of legal concepts.”

Gottlieb & Kerret on Pollutant Release & Transfer Registers

At the ASNA 2009 Applications of Social Network Analysis conference, Professor Avi Gottlieb & Professor Dorit Kerret of Tel Aviv University gave a paper entitled Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers (PRTRs): A Case Study of Environmental Policy Networks. Here is the abstract:

“Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers (PRTRs) are web-based public-access environmental information systems on industrial emissions of pollutants, anchored in national, regional, and international legislation. PRTRs are employed in over 30 countries, on the premise that the environmental authorities, together with other social agents such as the media, non-governmental organizations and the public, will use the PRTR in various ways, thereby increasing the pressure on polluting industries to improve their environmental performance.

“The popularity of PRTRs is part of a striking shift in social and especially environmental policy during the last decades. Many studies depict a transition from hierarchical policy systems, where the state is the sole regulator, to reflexive, networked, and cooperative arrangements that engage different interests groups in the regulatory process and in policy-making, and embrace innovative policy tools such as self-regulation and voluntary compliance.

“This shift toward more reflexive policy-making encourages the networking and interactions of the above-mentioned social agents and interest groups, increases their participation in the policy process and their influence on policy-making and on the setting of policy goals and policy tools – depending on their resources, social power and location in these networks. The actions and interactions of these social agents are empirical manifestations, in situ so to speak, of the environmental policy networks that determine if, how and to what effect the PRTR is used as a policy instrument.

“Recent studies evince considerable variations between countries in the effects of PRTRs on industrial emissions. We hypothesize that these unexplained differences are the product of different national environmental regimes (on a continuum from hierarchical to reflexive), which in turn shape the form of the relevant policy networks and the way their members interact, and ultimately policy outcomes.

“This paper reports findings from a cross-nationally comparative study of the use of PRTRs in three countries with substantially different environmental regimes. Samples of environmental administrators in both the environmental authorities and industry were polled in a web-based survey about environmental policies in their countries, the interfaces between government and industry in pollution control issues, and their utilization of the PRTR. The findings support recent evidence that reflexive policy tools such as the PRTR improve environmental performance only in the context of strict regulation and enforcement.”

ILTA ’09

ILTA ’09, the 2009 meeting of the International Legal Technology Association, is taking place August 23-27, 2009 at the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center, National Harbor, Maryland. The theme of the conference is “Leading Technology | Optimizing Value.”

During the conference, news is available on the ILTA blog, on Twitter (the conference Twitter feed is @ilta09, and the conference hashtag is #ilta09), and on the conference Website (see “Latest News” on the left). Other social network coverage of the conference is described here.

Webcasts of several events are available here.

The brief overview version of the program schedule is available here, and the detailed program schedule is here. A “digital program guide” is available here. The organizers have provided a search tool for identifying programs of interest, and several online planners.

A list of speakers is available here. Of particular interest to legal informatics researchers are two appearances by Dr. Richard Susskind:

• Dr. Susskind will give a “Super Session” address entitled The End of Lawyers (see the slides here), on Wednesday, August 26 at 8:00 a.m.; and
• Dr. Susskind will appear on a panel entitled Technologies That Will Disrupt Traditional Law Practice (see the slides here), on Wednesday, August 26 at 11:00 a.m.

A list of vendor exhibits is here, and a “virtual exhibit hall” is here (HT IntegreonEDD).

We wish our colleagues at ILTA ’09 an exciting and rewarding conference.

Jondet on DRM Interoperability & Reverse-Engineering

[NOTE: Updated on 8-21-09 to add the abstract and correct Mr. Jondet's title.]

Nicolas Jondet, a Ph.D. candidate at the AHRC Research Centre in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Edinburgh, will present France: The Land of the Linux? The Case of DRM Interoperability and Reverse-engineering, at GikII 2009 (also known as Gikii 4), a conference sponsored by the Institute for Information Law (IViR) of the Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam, to be held September 17-18, 2009 at the Institute. I’ve requested an abstract, which I’ll post here if I receive it. Here is the abstract (thanks to Mr. Jondet for providing it):

“Digital Rights Management systems (DRMs), the technical protection measures that media companies embed in digital content to control the way it is accessed and used by consumers, have become ubiquitous in the field of commercial entertainment. Introduced to prevent piracy these digital locks are not, however, infallible: ingenious computer enthusiasts always find ways to circumvent them. To counter DRMs’ inherent fallibility, international copyright laws have been modified to punish such circumvention. This new copyright regime and the widespread deployment of DRMs have raised many legal and practical concerns.

“Not only have DRMs seemingly failed to prevent piracy, they have also generated a series of unintended problems for legitimate consumers. Many have been frustrated by faulty and sometimes hazardous DRMs. More importantly, the lack of interoperability between competing DRMs often ‘locks-in’ consumers with one technology provider, preventing them from changing the software or devices they use to play content.

“This lack of interoperability is particularly obvious to consumers whose computers are not operated by proprietary software such as the well-known Windows and Mac operating systems, but by open source software such as Linux-based platforms. Traditionally, DRMs have been designed by proprietary software companies to work exclusively on proprietary platforms.

“This leaves open source users unable to enjoy the media content they have bought as they do not have access to the kind of DRM-compliant players available to Windows and Mac users. To overcome this deadlock, members of the open source community have managed to devise software bypassing DRM protections. This has been done through the process of reverse-engineering. The software obtained through reverse engineering allows open source users to play protected content. Is such software lawful, however? Or, since it has been developed wihtout the consent of DRM providers, does it constitute a circumventing device, the creation, possession and dissemination of which is prohibited.

“In July 2008, the Conseil d’Etat, the French Supreme Court in administrative matters, ruled that DRM circumvention fines were not applicable to the possession of open source software obtained through the reverse engineering of DRMs if this software was designed for interoperability purposes. This paper will explain this decision in depth. It will also explain the context of open source adoption in France, trying to determine whether the widespread adoption of open source software by French institutions, notably the French Parliament will have an impact in shaping copyright law.”

Gov 2.0 Summit: Law-Related Programs

[NOTE: Updated on 29 September 2009 to link to the video of Stephen Schultze's presentation on Crowdsourcing Federal Court Transparency.]

Several law-related presentations are scheduled to be given at the Gov 2.0 Summit, to be held September 9-10, 2009 at the Grand Hyatt Washington, Washington, DC:

• Beth Noveck, Director of the White House Open Government Initiative: Open Government, Open Policy Making;
• Professor John Podesta, President & CEO of the Center for American Progress: Public Policy Making and Innovation;
• Carl Malamud, Public.Resource.Org, Inc.: “By the People…”;
• Dr. John Clippinger, Co-Director of The Law Lab at Harvard University; Mary Ruddy of Meristic, Inc.; & Judith Spencer of the U.S. General Services Administration: Identity.

For more information, see the complete program.

Those attending the Summit may also be interested in a presentation by Stephen Schultze, of The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, on Crowdsourcing Federal Court Transparency, discussing the RECAP project, (video available here, HT Connie Crosby) on September 8, 2009, at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase, to be held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC. HT @evwayne.

Schultze on Crowdsourcing Federal Court Transparency

[NOTE: Updated on 29 September 2009 to link to the video of Stephen Schultze's presentation.]

Stephen Schultze, of The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, will present Crowdsourcing Federal Court Transparency (video available here, HT Connie Crosby) on September 8, 2009, at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase, to be held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC. Here is the abstract:

“Until now, the conversation about government 2.0 has focused almost exclusively on just two of the three branches of government: the executive and legislative. Our project, called RECAP, takes this movement to the third branch—the judiciary. Today, government puts federal court records online in a system called PACER: Public Access to Electronic Court Records. Created by the courts in the late 1980s, the system was ahead of the curve when it first appeared. But today, PACER is a relic of an earlier era. It keeps documents behind a pay-wall, offering users metered access at eight cents per ‘page’ (effectively, per screenful). This pay-to-play model severely hinders widespread access to the law by activists, academics, the media and other concerned citizens with an interest in the judicial process. Fortunately, these public documents are not eligible for copyright, so once a document has been retrieved from PACER, it may be freely shared and reproduced. RECAP enables citizens to easily share federal court documents. The goal of this project, over time, is to publish an extensive archive to the public for free (as in beer). This will not only help people who are interested in a particular case, but will also pave the way for others to build more and better tools.

“In our talk, we plan discuss both the technical workings of RECAP, as well as the policy implications of our project. In particular, we will report on the current status of our collection, legal issues we have encountered and the larger policy context for our work.”

HT Tim O’Reilly.

Linked Data and Law

Since I last posted on the availability of Library of Congress Subject Headings for law becoming available as Linked Data marked up in SKOS, a number of additional legal information resources have become available as Linked Data (or, in the case of the LKIF-Core Ontology, have been available for some time, but I’ve only recently learned of the Linked Data version). Here is a description of those that I can identify from the LinkedData.org Data Sets page (those identified from other sources are noted):

• The Legal Information Institute has described its Linked Legal Data project respecting the Code of Federal Regulations, in Casellas et al., Linked Legal Data: Improving Access to Regulatory Information (2012);
• The CALI Taxonomy is in the process of being marked up in RDF and made available as Linked Data, in a joint project of CALI: The Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School, and the Rutgers University Camden Law Library Digital Collections. Thanks to Tom Bruce, Director of the LII, and John Joergensen, creator of the Rutgers Camden Digital Collections for this information;
• DBPedia offers law-related articles from Wikipedia as Linked Data marked up in RDF & SKOS; here is the display for “tort law”;
• The first two levels of the “Law” classes of the Dewey Decimal Classification are now available as Linked Data (HT Lorcan Dempsey);
• EUROVOC, the European multilingual thesaurus, which contains a rich set of legal subject terms, is now available as Linked Data in SKOS from EUROVOC and from CTIC;
• GovTrack includes U.S. congressional legislation and The Congressional Record as Linked Data marked up in on RDF;
• The Italian Senate has made available a SPARQL endpoint for legislative Linked Data;
• The LC Name Authority File is now available as Linked Data (as of August 2011). Click here for access to bulk data for download. This file contains records for very large numbers of government entities in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, India, and many other nations, as well as the names of thousands of law-related individuals. Click here for more details. HT @naypinya;
• The Library of Congress (LC) plans to make its Name Authority File available as RDF Linked Data later in 2010. That file contains the names of thousands of government agencies in the U.S., the U.K., and other jurisdictions, as well as the names of thousands of law-related individuals. Thanks to a source at LC for this information;
• The Library of Congress (LC) Subject Headings are available in SKOS Linked Data [URL corrected 10 August 2011]. Click here for access to bulk data for download. LC Subject Headings contain very large and detailed taxonomies of subject terms for U.S. and U.K. law, as well as legal taxonomies for many other jurisdictions, and for public international law. Click here for a post about the implications of LC Subject Headings in SKOS Linked Data, for digital legal publishing. (Note that the Linked Data versions of the Rameau and LC Subject Headings now link to each other.)
• FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) as Linked Data, published by OCLC: This is “an enumerative, faceted subject heading schema derived from the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)”; i.e., an un-coordinated version of LCSH. Like LCSH, FAST contains a very large collection of legal subject terms. Click here for a description of FAST Linked Data.
• The Library of Congress Classification K Class: Law is available as Linked Data from the LC Linked Data Service. Click here for Kevin Ford’s post describing the data.
• The Legal Information Institute Legislative Metadata Model supports Linked Data;
• The LKIF-Core Ontology, developed within the ESTRELLA project, has been available in RDF since at least 2007 (HT Dr. Rinke Hoekstra);
• The UK National Archives‘ Legislation.gov.uk incorporates Linked Data (click here for details; for earlier discussion of this system, see details from Dr. John L. Sheridan via Dr. Adam Wyner here and here);
• The MetaLex Document Server is a source for all Dutch national statutes and regulations, free on the Web, in CEN MetaLex XML and RDF Linked Data. It was developed by Dr. Rinke Hoekstra of Leibniz Center for Law. (Click here for a post about The MetaLex Document Server.)
• RAMEAU French-language subject headings for legal topics are now available in Linked Data marked up on SKOS, from the Department of Computer Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. (Note that the Linked Data versions of the Rameau and LC Subject Headings now link to each other.)

  For example, here is the display for “Faute (droit)”. Here are instructions for using the search interface:

  • In section 1., under “Concept Scheme Group”, select “Rameau”;
  • In section 2., in the “Label” box, enter a law-related term, such as: faute ;
  • In the results list of subject terms, click on one of the terms (e.g., click on Faute (droit));
  • At the bottom of the page, click on “Display concept details”;
  • On the page that appears, the related concepts will display; click on any of them to explore further.
• The UMBEL ontology includes several legal concepts available as Linked Data; search here (e.g., search for: law );
• VIAF, the Virtual International Authority File, enables bulk download of Linked Data versions (in RDF) of name authority records for organizations (corporate bodies) and individuals (personal names) from more than 30 national or research libraries. Records can also be searched through the VIAF Web user interface;
• Joshua Tauberer has made some U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission documents from the EDGAR database available as Linked Data marked up in RDF;
• Watchdog.net includes metadata for selected U.S. congressional legislation as Linked Data marked up in RDF; for example, here is metadata for H.R. 1357 from the 108th Congress (click on “XML” in the line that begins “Developers”);
• The Linked Data version of WordNet, from the RKB Explorer Initiative, contains a very large number of legal terms; see, e.g., this display for “Contract” (scroll down to see all the related terms);
• The eGovernment Interest Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C eGov IG) has published a report entitled Publishing Open Government Data that recommends that governments incorporate Linked Data into their publicly available information;
• The YAGO ontology contains a number of legal concepts, available as Linked Data; see, e.g., the display for “tort”. Here are suggestions for using the search interface:
  • Scroll down to the words “Query Form”;
  • In the row labeled “?id0:”, in the first box, enter a legal term, such as estoppel;
  • In the second box in that row, select the term “means”;
  • Click “Submit”;
  • When the results appear, click on any of the results to see the Linked Data display;
  • In the Linked Data display, click on any of the results to explore further.

If you know of additional legal knowledge representation systems available as Linked Data, please mention them in the comments.

[Updated 26 April 2013 to include VIAF, the Virtual International Authority File. HT @3windmills]

[Updated 26 April 2013 to include Bulk access to Library of Congress Linked Data Name Authority records and Subject Authority records. HT @3windmills]

[Updated 12 April 2013 to include The Library of Congress Classification K Class: Law, now available as Linked Data from the LC Linked Data Service.

[Updated 18 March 2013 to include the Italian Senate's SPARQL endpoint for legislative Linked Data.]

[Updated 16 March 2013 to include Legal Information Institute Legislative Metadata Model.]

[UPDATE 6 April 2012: The Legal Information Institute has described its legal Linked Data project respecting the Code of Federal Regulations in Casellas et al., Linked Legal Data: Improving Access to Regulatory Information (2012).]

[Updated 15 December 2011: OCLC has made available FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) as Linked Data.]

[UPDATE 10 August 2011: The Library of Congress has made available the LC Name Authority File as Linked Data.]

[NOTE: Updated on 29 July 2010 to link to the new Legislation.gov.uk. Updated on 18 February 2010 to correct the RAMEAU link. Updated on 17 February 2010 to link to the SKOS version of EUROVOC (HT @iricelino). Updated on 17 January 2010 to mention that the Linked Data versions of the Rameau and Library of Congress Subject Headings now link to each other. Updated on 2 January 2010 to add link to Library of Congress Subject Headings in SKOS Linked Data, and to revise the link to UK OPSI's Legislation site. Updated on 1 January 2010 to mention LC's plan to make its Name Authority File available as Linked Data later in 2010, and the effort to make the CALI Taxonomy available as Linked Data. Updated on 20 September 2009 to link to UK OPSI's Single Legislation Service and to the W3C eGovernment Interest Group's report entitled Publishing Open Government Data. Updated on 8-20-09 to include LKIF-Core Ontology.]

Call for Papers: LILAC10

[NOTE: Some papers and online discussion from the conference are now available, as of 3 February 2010.]

A call for papers, submission deadline September 18, 2009, has been issued for LILAC10: The Learning in Law Annual Conference 2010, to be held January 29-30, 2010, at the University of Warwick School of Law, Warwick, England. The theme of the conference is “Perspectives on Progress.” According to the conference organizers, “LILAC10 will provide a forum for delegates to critically assess the concept of ‘progress’ in the context of legal education locally, nationally and globally. The conference will provide participants with an opportunity to debate issues such as:

• how do we measure or account for progress?
• what capabilities do we need (students, staff, institutions) to progress?
• how can the curriculum underpin the progress that we seek?
• what destination(s), if any, are we progressing towards?”

“The global context in which education takes place, and in particular concerns about sustainability and ethical practice, will form a backdrop to discussions about whether our understandings of progress in legal education, and the frameworks we construct to support it, are fit for purpose.”

Proposals are invited on the following topics (including, I understand, technology issues & applications pertaining to these topics):

• “the student life cycle – access, transition and progression
• academic futures
• curriculum change
• progress in pedagogy, and
• destinations.”

For more information, see the call for papers.

FLACOS 2009: Registration

Registration, with deadline of August 25, 2009, is open for FLACOS 2009, the Third Workshop on Formal Languages and Analysis of Contract-Oriented Software, to be held September 24-25, 2009, at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Department of Computer Science, in Toledo, Spain. The workshop is organized by the department’s Real-Time and Concurrent Systems Group.

The conference proceedings are already available here, abstracts are available here, and the program is available here.

For more information, see the conference Website.