There was some discussion a while back (check the archives since I probably sent a URL) about how 'the law' was being buried in copyrighted archives that were unavailable to the 'common man'... Just another example of how fucked up the courts and law in general in this country is. On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Ray Dillinger wrote:
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?
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