California Assemblyman Brian Nestande (R-42nd Dist.) has put forth a bill to apply a Creative Commons License to the California Code of Regulations (CCR). According to Mr. Nestande’s site, “AB 292 will provide that the full text of the California Code of Regulations shall have an open access creative commons attribution license, allowing any individual, at no cost, to use,…
Last week, Public.Resource.Org, through their counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, filed an action for declaratory judgement against the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors’ National Association, Inc. [SMACNA]. In its complaint, Public.Resource.org asserts that since SMACNA’s copyrighted standards were explicitly incorporated into federal and state law, they have become part of the public domain and are no longer subject…
Two legislative crowdsourcing efforts came across my desk today: OpenPACER and Fork the Law. I love the idea of collective effort to make laws. The government has tried this to some extent with Regulations.gov. There, you can sort, view, and comment on proposed regulations. An even better iteration of this is GovPulse, a site that was created in the private…
The Judicial Council announced last week that they plan to expand a pilot program to push federal court opinions to FDSys. In theory, that means that all federal court opinions could be published and freely available in the FDSys database soon. FDSys is the digital repository for federal publications. It is operated by the Government Printing Office. Last year, the Judicial…
CALI has developed a prototype for uploading, storing, and sharing official court opinions called CourtCloud. Elmer Masters, the Director of Internet Development there, calls it a “Dropbox for courts.” The purpose of CourtCloud is to help courts self-publish their opinions. I’ll break it down for non-technical people (such as myself): The court clerk or judge has a CourtCloud folder on…
Access to opinions and codes is of particular interest to the bloggers at Justia. We complain mightily about private citation formats, paywalls to codes and caselaw online, privatization of court services and filings, and the government’s overall failure to provide us with official, free access to the public record. Last week’s news about the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act,…
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently announced that it will move to “in-house publishing” of its opinions. According to the press release, “Court staff now manage the process of converting opinions from the original word processing documents into Adobe PDF files, which are then uploaded onto the website, where they can be viewed and/or downloaded by the public.” This…
It appears that court opinions in FDSys are being indexed by the search engines now. If you’ll recall, the GPO announced last year that it was importing opinions from some federal courts into its centralized database (FDSys). In theory, this means that users would be able to search across a large collection of government documents that will now include published…
California Watch, part of the Center for Investigative Reporting, has a post this week about the relative costs and revenue of PACER. We’ve talked about the problems with PACER fees and the impediments to access before, and it is certainly a familiar topic to those of us in the free law community, but it hasn’t gotten much attention outside of…
All of us at Justia – human and pup alike – would like to wish everyone a Happy 4th of July! Given what we do here, it shouldn’t be any surprise that we’d also like to declare this Free Law Independence Day. To paraphrase Richard Henry Lee’s famous resolution, and with a little help from our friends at Law.gov, let…