Comments for EFF, Creative Commons Offer Developers Free Access to 2m Pages of Legal Documents

EFF, Creative Commons Offer Developers Free Access to 2m Pages of Legal Documents

2008-02-12T02:03:27Z

Creative Commons announced tonight that in partnership with Public.Resource.Org and with legal representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it has purchased and has now made available at no charge the equivalent of nearly two million pages of legal documents. If printed and piled on top of each other, the documents would make a stack of books 348 feet tall. Included are all U.S. Supreme Court decisions and all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 on.

Though these texts have always technically been in the public domain, the organizations had to purchase the electronic version from a private company that had compiled it. Now available at this link, they have also been converted to XHMTL so that anyone can develop user interfaces and search engines against the information.

]]> Context Will the development community rise to the challenge of building on top of this historic data? It's a solid bet that it will. From basic incorporation of the newly available content into existing search engines to more sophisticated and unexpected application development, this large database of structured, historically important information is sure to prove valuable in ways beyond the immediate importance of public access on principle.

There's certainly an active developer community ready and willing these days to experiment either for public good and/or personal advancement. The Reuters semantic web API OpenCalais that we wrote about last week, for example, has had 500 developers sign up to use the API in a single week, we're told by project partner Mashery.

While the newly released legal documents are content more than they are technology, in this emerging era of data, that distinction is growing less important. Freely available, large quantities of content are just asking for machine processing, but all the cool tools that are being developed need content to stoke their hungry fires and give them meaning. What better content to do so than a key part of the formerly inaccessible legal fabric of recent US history?

Comment from Tech For Novices on 2008-02-11

2008-02-12T07:53:37Z

Maybe its dumb but we put in a google cse to it.

Comment from Abhijeet Mukherjee on 2008-02-12

2008-02-12T09:14:22Z

I think this is an extremely important development which hasn't seen a hype yet in the technology world and has gone almost unnoticed except for your post on this.

The kind of access this gives,especially to people who pursue legal matters, is certainly incredible.However I am a bit skeptical about the fact whether the developer community will rise overwhelmingly to this opportunity unless it is backed by a powerful firm like Google which has successfully implemented the Book Search library project.

In fact the question of profitability does arise here because Google hasn't really monetized its book search project and it can still easily continue that service inspite of the fact that it is not one of its widely used services.Similarly ,the legal documents search or a similar service will cater to a specific niche/group and to what extent the developer who develops the service can capitalize through it ,is a question.

But yes...when you say there is an active developer community willing to experiment for public good,its certainly true and I hope that such a community does come forward to implement the project.