Kraft and Jaquith: Launch of Maryland Decoded

Seamus Kraft and Waldo Jaquith tell us about the launch of Maryland Decoded, a new free-access-to-law site for the U.S. state of Maryland, built by Seamus and colleagues at the OpenGov Foundation, on Waldo’s State Decoded platform.

Here is a description, from the Maryland Decoded “About” page:

Maryland Decoded is a non-profit, non-governmental, non-partisan implementation of The State Decoded brought to you by the folks at the OpenGov Foundation. The State Decoded is a free, open source project that provides a platform to display state-level legal information in a friendly, accessible, modern fashion. Maryland is the third state to deploy the software, with more coming soon.[...]

For more details, please see Waldo’s post, OpenGov Foundation’s post, or the Maryland Decoded site.

HT @waldojaquith

Open DC Code Hackathon: Tweets and 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

• Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the Open DC Hackathon 2013, in .cvs format.

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.

• Code for the Open DC Code Browser is available at https://github.com/openlawdc/code-browser
• Tom MacWright points to DC Code section 5-101.03 as an example of improvements made to the Open DC Code browser at the hackathon.

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.

HT @konklone @sglassmeyer @tmcw @waldojaquith

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.

Discussion then occurred regarding how to make the DC Code publicly available online in a version that was free of copyright.

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:

• Tom MacWright: DC’s laws aren’t yours
• Cory Doctorow: Municipal codes of DC, free for all — liberated without permission
• Waldo Jaquith: Washington D.C. and the Work Ahead
• Steve Schultze: The District of Columbia Claims Copyright on the Law
• Martin Austermuhle: Breaking the Law to Publish the Law: Open Government Advocate Digitizes Entirety of D.C. Code
• Tom MacWright: The Open Code
• Tom Lee: The D.C. Code is Open–Come Hack on It!
• Dr. Joshua Tauberer: DC opens its “code”, embracing principles of open laws

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.

Jaquith: Two Mini-Projects spun off from The State Decoded: Subsection Identifier & Definition Scraper

Waldo Jaquith has posted Two Mini-Projects: Subsection Identifier and Definition Scraper, at The State Decoded blog.

Here are excerpts from the post:

The State Decoded project has spun off a couple of sub-projects, components of the larger project that can be useful for other purposes, and that deserve to stand alone. (Both are found on our GitHub repository.)

The first is Subsection Identifier, which turns theoretically structured text into actually structured text. It is common for documents in outline form (contracts, laws, and other documents that need to be able to cross-reference specific passages) to be provided in a format in which the structural labels flow into the text. [...]

The second mini-project is Definition Scraper, which extracts defined terms from passages of text. Many legal documents begin by defining words that are then used throughout the document, and knowing those definitions can be crucial to understanding that document. So it can be helpful to be able to extract a list of terms and their definitions. Definition Scraper needs only be handed a passage of text, and it will determine whether it contains defined terms and, if it does, it will return a dictionary of those terms and their definitions. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

The State Decoded is Waldo’s free and open legal data and e-participation platform for U.S. states.

Click here for other posts about The State Decoded.

HT @StateDecoded here and here

MacWright on Copyright Barriers to Creating a Free and Open DC Code

Tom MacWright of MapBox has posted You Cannot Have the DC Code, at macwright.org.

Here are excerpts:

You cannot have a digital copy of the DC Code. You cannot have a public domain version of the code, despite it being legally public domain. [...]

You cannot. There is no-one to ask who can give you one and who wants to. The government only has copyright-infected copies, and the contractor has no reason to endanger their information monopoly.

To preclude misunderstandings: this is not a failure of the [DC] Council itself. [...]

The Council composes and publishes its bills and makes every effort at transparency: this is a failure of the last step, in which the bill is compiled and de-facto owned by a private contractor.

This is not a question of hacking or technology. Writing a scraper for the portal is an afternoon project, but is illegal, and can be construed as a felony by the federal government.

This is a failure of the public/private contracting system and the government’s ability to write strong and precise contracts that are geared for the internet era.

This is a failure of Westlaw and LexisNexis. It’s possibly a reiteration of a well-known court case focused on their previous attempt to do the same thing: monetize what should be a basic unit of democracy.

Next up: how this is possible, what it means, and how we can fix it.

Click here for a storify of some responses to the post.

For more details, please see the complete post.

Ed Walters of Fastcase has written powerfully about this problem in his post, Tear Down This Paywall: The End of Private Copyright in Public Statutes, at VoxPopuLII.

Waldo Jaquith has developed a free and open platform for statutory codes, called The State Decoded.

HT Dan Nagy

Jaquith: Version 0.6 of The State Decoded released

Waldo Jaquith has released version 0.6 of The State Decoded, his open legal data and e-participation platform for U.S. states, as explained in his new post entitled Version 0.6 Released at The State Decoded blog.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

Version 0.6 of The State Decoded is now available on GitHub. This release is a really exciting one—it establishes a public API for State Decoded sites and creates a standard XML format for importing laws! This is an important release of The State Decoded, one that stands to significant increase the accessibility of the project to developers, both within the software and without. A total of 23 issues were resolved, nearly all of which are towards those two goals. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @waldojaquith

Jaquith on Opening Up State Legal Data

Waldo Jaquith of The State Decoded has posted Opening Up State Legal Data, at VoxPopuLII.

In this post Waldo provides an update on The State Decoded, his open legal data and e-participation platform for U.S. states.

A new version 0.5 of The State Decoded has just been released.

Some code for The State Decoded is on GitHub:

• Waldo’s repository is here;
• Others’ repositories are here.

HT @LIICornell and @waldojaquith

Jaquith Releases First Version of The State Decoded Open Legal Data Platform for States

Waldo Jaquith has released the first version of The State Decoded, an open software platform that enables open public access to state legislative data and court decisions.

According to the Readme posted along with the code at GitHub, version 1.0 of The State Decoded is written in PHP and MySQL.

Development of The State Decoded has been funded by a Knight News Challenge grant.

The initial implementation of The State Decoded, called Virginia Decoded, went live in March 2012.

For more information on The State Decoded or Virginia Decoded, please see:

• Waldo’s posts about the project at The State Decoded Website
• this post about the launch of Virginia Decoded
• this interview with Waldo about the development of The State Decoded.

Jaquith on Answering Legal Questions with Google

Waldo Jaquith of The State Decoded has posted Answering Legal Questions with Google, at The State Decoded.

In this post, Mr. Jaquith describes the search engine traffic of Virginia Decoded, the first implementation of The State Decoded open legislative data platform.

Key findings include:

• The distribution of search queries is “very flat,” with more than 95% of queries having been “used just 1 time”
• “Many of these search terms are extremely specific”
• Problem solving appears to motivate many queries
• “Some of these search terms return results that would not otherwise yield useful results from the official Code of Virginia website,” in part because Virginia Decoded returns court decisions that interpret a statute, along with the text of the statute (and he offers an interesting example involving a statute that has been subject to constitutional challenge)
• Visit duration is approximately 90 seconds
• Visitors view an average of “2.68 pages”

Mr. Jaquith concludes:

The plan [of The State Decoded] was to turn entire state codes into enormous targets for search traffic to help people solve problems and better understand the laws that govern them. Traffic records bear out that at least the former half of that plan is being fulfilled. That accomplished, I can concentrate more on the latter, which was always going to be the real work.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Jaquith on The State Decoded: Parsing Statutory Histories and Turning Laws Inside Out

Waldo Jaquith of The State Decoded has published two posts on the PBS / Knight Foundation MediaShift / IdeaLab blog:

• How to Decode State Law Histories
• The State Decoded Turns Laws Inside Out

In How to Decode State Law Histories, Mr. Jaquith describes a parser that he is developing for The State Decoded, his state-level open legislative data platform, that would render in plain language the complex and arcane histories of amendments, that appear in the notes of many sections of statutory codes. [Click here for background on The State Decoded.] He writes that he is developing:

a parser for the State Decoded for these history sections, so that rather than displaying this cryptic content, instead the material will be provided in plain English. By storing this data atomically, it’ll be possible to generate a listing of all laws that were amended in a given year, all laws amended by a given portion of the Acts of the General Assembly, or find laws similar to a given law based on their shared history of being amended within the same portion of the Acts. I’m optimistic that it’ll be possible to connect many state codes’ history records back to individual pieces of legislation, rather than just the legislature’s changelog, which opens up a potential wealth of information. (This can already be seen on Virginia Decoded for all changes from 2006 onward, such as in the “Amendment Attempts” listing on § 2.2-3705.1.)

In The State Decoded Turns Laws Inside Out, Mr. Jaquith describes two methods by which The State Decoded seeks to improve public access to state laws.

The first is by “reducing laws to their smallest possible units, indexing them via every possible metric.” The second is by “exposing all of those internal structures” through application programming interfaces (APIs). Mr Jaquith describes the possible benefits of releasing legislative data through APIs as follows:

There are people much smarter than I who will grasp the fascinating applications and analyses that can be created with these data. Perhaps they’ll find that legislators in different political parties tend to pass bills that affect distinctly different titles of the code. Or that the SMOG ranking of amendments to the code have gradually been increasing. Maybe that legislation amending a law tends to follow a spike in scholarly citations of that law. Who knows?

Mr. Jaquith adds:

The API for Virginia [Decoded] is in alpha testing now. If you’re interested in putting it to work, send an e-mail saying so to join the alpha test.