Free, Free, Set Them (Cases) Free

Jose Padilla is last week's news. The new surviellance law merits a little more reflection before I'm willing to chime in. It's a Monday in August. So this morning I'm focusing off-the-beaten track a bit with a story from the New York Times about one man's fight to get us all better online access to legal information-- literally, case law-- the publishing rights to which right now are controlled by two huge corporations.

It's hard to identify anything more "public" than a published ruling from a state or federal court-- such decisions literally are the "law and the land." And yet they are not freely available on the web (even though they are freely available at your local law library, provided you can gain entrance to your local law library). Enter this guy, Carl Malamud, who has founded publicresource.org, who is famous enough to have his own Wikipedia entry, and who is otherwise fighting against a duopoly that currently controls publishing rights to most court decisions.

I'm firmly on the side of the little guy here-- who isn't?-- but what to do with the information is not a question that is seemlessly answered. Should the government ensure that its work product be available as cheaply as possible to the most people? Or should it try to use market forces-- the fact that someone is willing to pay for public information and then turn around and sell it to people-- to gain financial advantage? Is there a way to satisfy the discordant priorities? Beats me. But I look forward to the day when all published state and federal decisions are freely available, Google like, at the push of a button. Go Carl Go.

By Andrew Cohen |  August 20, 2007; 8:42 AM ET
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