As announced at public.resource.org, CC and public.resource.org have announced the first release of material to support our free law project. After raising a large chunk of change from great and generous sorts like David Boies, John Gilmore, the Omidyar Network and the Elbaz Foundation, we’ve purchased a database of a substantial part of all federal cases. Carl’s team has now made all the data available in a beautiful, xml format for developers to take and use however they want. The however they want part is what’s assured by the CCØ mark on all cases — no rights, including attribution rights, are asserted over these data at all. Free law available for anyone to build search engines, or collections, or whatever else they want.
Big news in the free law department (Lessig Blog)
Pretty major stuff here. Coverage includes the Supremes, 1 U.S. 1 solid through 524 U.S. 775 plus intermittent coverage through 2005; Circuits, 178 F.2d 1 through 999 F.2d 1584 and 1 F.3d 1 through 491 F.3d 1342. All of the decisions are very nicely formated in XML and transform wonderfully to the web. The regular XML will make the slicing and dicing we want to do work well. I would suggest that you keep an eye on CALI’s eLangdell project for more fun as we do a ‘rip, mix’ learn’ make over on some of this caselaw.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: eLangdell, caselaw, open source, free law