Fastcase Introduces e-Books, Beginning with Advance Sheets

Fastcase, the online legal research service, has begun publishing e-books in EPUB and .mobi formats, and the first set of Fastcase e-books consists of advance sheets of U.S. state and federal court decisions, according to Sean Doherty’s post, Fastcase’s Free E-Books May Disrupt Legal Book Publishing at Law Technology News, and the post, Fastcase eBooks: Advance Sheets are a Glimpse Into the Future, on Fastcase’s Legal Research Blog.

According to the Fastcase blog post, Fastcase advance sheets will be available “for each state, federal circuit, and U.S. Supreme Court”; will be free of charge and “licensed under [a] Creative Commons BY-SA license“; and will include summaries. Each e-Book Advance Sheet will contain “one month’s judicial opinions (designated as published and unpublished) for specific states or courts.”

According to Sean Doherty’s post, future Fastcase e-Books will include “e-book case reporters with official pagination and links” into the Fastcase database, as well as “topical reporters” on U.S. law, covering fields such as securities law and antitrust law.

According to the Fastcase blog post, Fastcase’s approach to e-Books is inspired in part by CALI‘s Free Law Reporter, which makes case law available as e-Books in EPUB format.

Fastcase’s adaptation of e-Book technology developed by CALI represents a notable example of knowledge-sharing between the nonprofit and for-profit sectors of the legal informatics community.

For more information, please see the Fastcase blog post, Sean Doherty’s post, Bob Ambrogi’s post, and Greg Lambert’s post.

For more information about Free Law Reporter, please see John Mayer’s post, The Free Law Reporter: Open Access to the Law and Beyond, at VoxPopuLII.

Walters Revives Public Library of Law

Ed Walters of Fastcase has revived the Public Library of Law (PLoL) — a source of free, full text U.S. legal resources — according to a post by Greg Lambert entitled As LexisOne Goes Dark, Fastcase’s PLoL Comes Back To Life, at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog.

According to the post, Walters made decision to continue PLoL in response to the closing or reduction in scale of other free Web sources of U.S. law.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Justia Shares Case Summaries with Fastcase

Justia has begun sharing its summaries of U.S. state and federal court decisions with online legal research provider Fastcase, according to a press release issued 20 December 2011.

This arrangement is of interest to the legal informatics community, because it constitutes another example of the sharing of metadata among alternative legal information providers, for purposes of enhancing access to legal information and increasing competition in the commercial legal research services market. The arrangement is also of interest because it represents cooperation between an online legal information provider that primarily offers information for free, and one that operates primarily on a fee-based or contractual model.

Justia offers its case summaries free of charge, while Fastcase will include the summaries in its commercial legal research service.

For more information, please see the press release.

New on VoxPopuLII: Walters on The End of Private Copyright in Public Statutes

Ed Walters, Esq., of FastCase, has posted Tear Down This (Pay)Wall: The End of Private Copyright in Public Statutes, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Walters describes the extent to which U.S. state governments and for-profit legal publishers assert copyright in U.S. state statutes, and the problems this poses for due process of law, as well as for competition and innovation in the legal publishing industry. Mr. Walters explains the U.S. legal authorities prohibiting copyright in state statutes. Mr. Walters then proposes an innovative strategy
with which state governments can preclude assertions of copyright in state laws.

In the course of his argument, Mr. Walters notes the recent approval of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act, which has the potential to make important contributions toward freeing state statutes from copyright restrictions.

This post will be of interest to advocates of open government data, as well as to government technologists, legal publishers, developers of legal information systems, and all who seek greater competition and innovation in the U.S. legal publishing market.

Weekly Report of Current Opinions (RECOP): First Raw Feed Available

The first raw feed of the Weekly Report of Current Opinions (RECOP), a collection of newly released U.S. court decisions, is now available at Public.Resource.Org, according to a tweet by Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org.

Carl writes:

Will release processed version of cases in few weeks. Be careful if you use raw

Carl has also posted a new set of U.S. federal court decisions and docket information obtained from PACER, the U.S. federal judiciary’s fee-based database. Carl says a bit more about this data set in this tweet.

Click here for more information about RECOP.

New Source of Free U.S. Court Decisions: Weekly Report of Current Opinions (RECOP)

In 2011, Public.Resource.Org will publish a weekly release — called the Report of Current Opinions (RECOP) — of all slip and final opinions — in HTML — “of the appellate and supreme courts of the 50 [U.S.] states and the [U.S.] federal government,” according to a new post by Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org.

According to the post, the opinions will be licensed “under the Creative Commons CC-Zero License and will include full star pagination.”

According to the post, this effort is a joint project between Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase.

Participants in the Law.gov legal open government data movement will contribute to this project by “perform[ing] initial post-processing of the raw HTML data, including such tasks as privacy audits, conversion to XHTML, and tagging for style, content, and metadata.”

For more information, please see Carl’s post.

New Westlaw, Lexis, Bloomberg Systems Previewed by ABA Journal

[NOTE: Updated on 31 January 2010 to clarify the statement in the article that "[s]econdary sources will be coming soon to Fastcase.”]

New and revamped online legal research systems offered by Westlaw, Lexis.com, and Bloomberg are previewed in an article published online today by ABA Journal. Fastcase and Google Scholar are also discussed in the article.

Among the novel features of the new systems to be offered by Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg, the article identifies simplified user interfaces, improved natural language searching, better organized results displays, graphical displays of some data including citator results, and artificial intelligence features, including decision support.

The article also states that Fastcase plans to add secondary sources to its databases in the coming year. However, according to Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase, Fastcase’s content already includes secondary sources, including “newspapers, a people finder, business intelligence, and forms.” Walters says that additional secondary sources will be added to Fastcase in the future.

Google Scholar personnel are quoted in the article as stating that they have no plans to add significant improvements to the legal research components of their system.

Overall, the article appears to reflect a distinctly more competitive market for online legal research in the U. S.

Debate on Free Access to Law

[NOTE: Updated on 10 November 2010 to link to Professor Bruce's post entitled More West: What Legal Information Business Should The Government Be Out Of?. Updated on 8 November 2009 to link to Professor Bruce's post entitled The West Video and the Free Market. Updated on 4 November 2009 to link to Professor Berring's Nov. 3 reply, on sLaw.]

An interesting debate over free access to law is now occurring in the legal blogosphere.

Thomson Reuters, owners of West Publishing, a major U.S. legal publisher, and the Westlaw computer assisted legal research (CALR) service, recently published video comments about the free access to law movement by Professor Robert Berring of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, and a well respected expert on legal research. In the video Professor Berring praises the free access to law movement for increasing competition in the CALR market and compelling Westlaw and its main rival in the U.S. market, Lexis.com, to innovate. Yet Professor Berring also criticizes the free access to law movement as fleeting, and as providing insufficient metadata to enable high quality legal research.

This week Professor Daniel Poulin, Director of CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute, responded to Professor Berring’s comments, on the sLaw blog, and yesterday Professor Tom Bruce, Director of Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, published his response on his B-Screeds blog.

Ed Walters, Esq., CEO of Fastcase, Inc., has offered to convene a meeting of the participants of this debate.

On November 3, Professor Berring posted a reply, on sLaw.

On November 8, Professor Bruce responded with a post entitled The West Video and the Free Market.

On November 10, Professor Bruce responded again with a post entitled More West: What Legal Information Business Should The Government Be Out Of?.

Those interested in digital legal information or public access to legal information may find this debate particularly informative and timely.

HT @caminick for tweeting Prof. Poulin’s post.