On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, An Metet wrote:
Your complaints about "free research" suggest that you have the sense that you are more valuable than or superior to other contributors.
He is not "superior" in any substantial way; however, his expertise in law, combined with a willingness to actually discuss it, are in short supply here. That same expertise is extremely valuable to people designing systems, and for the sake of such people, please do not discourage him in any way from sharing it. The discussion of legal spoilation has been particularly enlightening; Before this discussion started I knew that it was possible to get in trouble for destroying documents before charges were filed or a subpeona was served. But before an investigation is even under way? Before a complaint is even filed? The mind boggles. I'd never have known that without reading the caterpillar cite, and as one who is not of the Priveleged Caste in terms of access to legal information, (ie, willing to pay thousands of bucks to Westlaw or whoever each year) I am grateful to him for passing it on. A worthwhile question for Cypherpunks -- all of the court decisions and cites are, technically, public domain information. And yet access to that information, in terms of legal databases, remains either extremely expensive, or the province of a Priveleged Caste (to whom "extremely expensive" looks like "normal business expenses"). Westlaw owns some of the most expensive copyrights, per-copy, of any entity -- and all they've done is number the pages and paragraphs and provide an index on public domain information. I think that there is, or ought to be, a good cypherpunk solution to making legal cites available for everyone. A distributed law library, hosted on many servers? Legal cites on Freenet? After all, what good is crypto anarchy if we can't break a copyright monopoly (or at least a case of non-competitive pricing) imposed on public domain information? Bear