The Colorado statutory code and the Baltimore, Maryland statutory code have been posted free on the Web by Public.Resource.Org.
Public.Resource.Org appears to be communicating with entities that assert copyright in those codes, about whether those entities will take legal action to prevent posting of those codes on the free Web and the use of those codes by developers to create new information resources.
This post links to selected resources from the Open DC Code Hackathon, held 14 April 2013 in Washington, DC, USA.
Click here for the hackathon’s Website.
The Twitter hashtag for the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 was #openlawdc
IRC discussion during the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 occurred on Freenode under #openlawdc
Online discussions of issues addressed at the hackathon are available at https://github.com/openlawdc/dc-decoded/issues and https://github.com/openlawdc/code-browser/issues
Tom MacWright has posted an FAQ about the DC Code and the hackathon.
Eric Mill has posted a detailed description of the hackathon: What Happens When You Open the DC Code.
The results of the hackathon are now available at the openlawdc repository on GitHub: https://github.com/openlawdc
Among the resources worked on at the hackathon was The Open DC Code browser.
Another product of the hackathon is a new online version of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, developed by Joshua Tauberer and Harlan Yu.
For background on the effort to make the DC Code freely available on the Web, please see Freeing the DC Code: An Update.
There have been several developments in recent weeks in the effort to make the District of Columbia statutory code freely available.
The project began in February 2013 when Tom MacWright posted You Cannot Have the DC Code, complaining that no free and open version of the DC Code was available for developers or the public to use.
In March 2013, Public.Resource.Org posted a digital version of the DC Code.
Last week, the DC Council said that they would not sue Public.Resource.Org for copyright infringement for posting a digital version of the code.
This week, the DC Council posted an unofficial digital version of the DC Code, licensed with the Creative Commons CC0 license.
This week it was announced that a hackathon to hack the DC Code will be held on 14 April 2013: Open DC Code Hackathon, in Washington, DC.
Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the Open DC Hackathon 2013, in .cvs format.
The Twitter hashtag for the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 was #openlawdc
IRC discussion during the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 occurred on Freenode under #openlawdc
Among the notable aspects of this project are that it demonstrates how members of the legal informatics and open-government-data communities can use the Internet to coordinate their efforts to make legal data publicly available, address challenging policy issues, and realize several of the principles of the open government data movement.
Here are selected articles and posts about the effort to make the DC Code publicly available on the Web and free of copyright restrictions:
For additional news about development of the Open DC Code, please see the comments to this post.
Thanks to Eric Mill and the members of the Legal Informatics Research Network for helping to gather the sources cited in this post.
Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org has posted his eulogy for Aaron Swartz, entitled Aaron’s Army.
The eulogy describes several of Carl and Aaron’s efforts to make legal data publicly available, including U.S. copyright registration records and U.S. federal judicial documents from the fee-based PACER database.
Data made public as a result of those efforts are now used in a number of publicly available services.
HT @binarybits
An open version of the California Code of Regulations — in HTML and RTF formats, and current as of March 2012 — has been posted at Public.Resource.Org, according to the readme file accompanying the data.
According to the readme, this is “an ALPHA RELEASE meant for developers.”
For more information, please see the readme and the data.
HT @carlmalamud.
Elmer Masters, Esq., of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) has posted The Future of the (Case)Book Is the Web, at the CALI Spotlight Blog.
In this post, Elmer advocates the publication of free and open legal casebooks on the free Web, using the open EPUB format. He describes CALI’s eLangdell legal open educational resource service as an example of this approach.
For more information, please see the complete post.
Harlan Yu of the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), and Stephen Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, have published Using software to liberate U.S. case law, in XRDS: Crossroads: The ACM Magazine for Students, December 2011.
[The article appears in a special issue of XRDS: Crossroads on the topic, "Computer Science in Service of Democracy", edited by Peter Kinnaird of Carnegie Mellon University. Click here for Mr. Kinnaird's preface to the special issue.]
In their article, Mr. Yu and Mr. Schultze describe their development of RECAP, a Firefox extension that “crowdsources the purchase of the [U.S. federal courts'] PACER repository [of court records] by helping users automatically share their purchases.”
The authors also describe how features of PACER limit public access to judicial information. The authors discuss their research — presented here and here — showing that PACER’s information management practices permit disclosure of sensitive personal information online. The authors also recommend reforms to U.S. federal court information technology that would protect citizens’ privacy while improving citizens’ access to court records of public interest.
For more information on RECAP and reform of PACER, please see Mr. Schultze’s VoxPopuLII post: PACER, RECAP, and the Movement to Free American Case Law.
John Mayer of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), has posted The Free Law Reporter – Open Access to the Law and Beyond, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.
In this post, Mr. Mayer describes The Free Law Reporter, CALI’s new free and open database of decisions from U.S. federal and state courts, built using data from Public.Resource.Org‘s RECOP database. RECOP is a project of the Law.gov legal open government data movement.
Mr. Mayer underscores the ebook functionality of Free Law Reporter: the system allows users to automatically transform their Free Law Reporter search results into ebooks in the open EPUB format. These ebooks can be used as casebooks for law school courses, as well as in other applications.
The Free Law Reporter‘s ebook functionality complements CALI’s other legal open educational resource services, the eLangdell free and open digital casebook/textbook service, and the Legal Education Commons, where law professors share their instructional resources online.
Mr. Mayer’s post also discusses the principles underlying The Free Law Reporter. The first of these is the idea that law professors and law librarians should have the freedom to customize databases and course materials to meet the particular needs of their students and the particular objectives of their courses; as Mr. Mayer writes, “Academic law libraries should have free and open access to the law, access that allows them to define and construct the educational environment for law students.”
In addition, Mr. Mayer characterizes The Free Law Reporter as a generative resource, that can foster innovation, creativity, and collaborative effort among law professors, law librarians, and other members of the legal educational community.
Mr. Mayer’s post should be of interest to law professors, law librarians, legal information systems developers, continuing legal education providers, ebook technologists, and the open educational resources community.
CALI, The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, has launched The Free Law Reporter (FLR), a new, free, online source of full text U.S. federal and state court decisions, published from January 2011 to the present.
Click here for a list of the content.
FLR contains data from RECOP, The Weekly Report of Current Opinions, distributed by Carl Malamud‘s Public.Resource.Org. RECOP is a project of the Law.gov legal open government data movement. FLR appears to be the second service to use RECOP data. The first appears to have been John Joergensen’s State and Federal Caselaw from the RECOP Project, at Rutgers-Camden Law.
The developers of FLR appear to be John Mayer and Elmer Masters of CALI.
FLR offers access to individual court decisions and to ebooks, in the open EPUB format, containing weekly compilations of court decisions from particular U.S. jurisdictions. Click here for 1FLRAlaska.epub, the first FLR ebook compilation from Alaska state courts. According to FLR’s technology page, FLR ebooks are available from the FLR Website and from CALI’s Legal Education Commons.
John Mayer also says: “you can do a search for cases [in FLR] and then download all of the results as an epub file.”
According to FLR’s technology page, FLR ebooks:
can be read on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs and laptops as well as iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. Amazon Kindle support is possible through third party conversion programs like Calibre while we research more direct paths to Kindle support.
FLR uses the Solr open source search engine. Click here for more details on the technology behind FLR.
Click here for Courtney Minick’s informative post about FLR at Justia’s Onward blog.
Click here for Bob Ambrogi’s informative post about FLR at his LawSites blog.
