My latest Web Watch column for Law Technology News magazine, Case Law Libre (free reg. required), looks at several recent projects to move case law into the public domain, from Public.Resource.Org to Alt-Law to PreCYdent. Here are the opening grafs:
…“Feb. 11, 2008 was a day that may forever change
I recently wrote here about PreCYdent, a sophisticated search engine for public-domain law. Now, the project’s CTO, Antonio Tomarchio, has posted this video showing how to use it and comparing it against commercial legal research tools.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RbljrunaAs]…
There’s something happening here. Just two days after Public.Research.Org published 1.8 million pages of copyright-free federal case law online (see my post), the company that provided it with those cases, Fastcase, unveiled an even larger free library of cases, statutes, regulations, court rules and legal forms. Called The Public Library of…
The day we previewed here last week has arrived: The non-profit organization Public.Resource.Org today released 1.8 million pages of federal case law free of copyright or other restrictions, in a joint venture with Creative Commons. The release includes all Supreme Court cases and all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 on.…
I reported here in November that 1.8 million pages of federal case law would go public early in 2008 through an agreement between Carl Malamud’s nonprofit organization Public.Resource.Org and the legal research company Fastcase. Today, Malamud said the release of those cases is scheduled for next week. The release will include all…
My Web Watch column this month, Search on Steroids, profiles Collexis, a powerful new search tool making its way into the legal market. The review notes, “The company also is preparing to launch other legal products based on the same search platform, including databases of federal and state case law and U.S. patents.…
I wrote here in November about plans by Public.Resource.Org to publish 1.8 million pages of public-domain federal case law sometime this year and its goal of eventually creating a public-domain repository of all federal and state case law. More recently, in an article of mine published on Law.com, I singled out Public.Resource.Org and…
Via the Massachusetts Law Updates blog, the Massachusetts Trial Court Libraries announced today the completion of a project to provide free online access to all Supreme Judicial Court and Mass. Appeals Court cases from 1986 to 1996. (Cases starting in 1997 are already available through Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.) The cases are available…
Carl Malamud’s nonprofit organization Public.Resource.Org and the legal research company Fastcase today announced an agreement that will allow Public.Resource.Org to publish 1.8 million pages of federal case law in the public domain. The archive, which will become available sometime in 2008, will include all U.S. courts of appeals decisions since 1950 and…
A new blog, Maryland Courts Watcher, provides synopses of every publicly available opinion published on the Internet by any court in Maryland. This includes the Court of Appeals, the Court of Special Appeals, the U.S. District Court, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, the Maryland Tax Court, the Circuit Court for Baltimore City and opinions of…
Some patent lawyers might consider the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to be a circus, but a new Web site aims to tame the lion of patent caselaw. Called FedCirc.us, the site is the latest and most ambitious project of the folks behind rethink(ip), patent attorneys and bloggers J. Matthew Buchanan,…
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