Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase, Inc. announced this week that they will make 1.8 million pages of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754, available in a free public archive. The entire archive will be in the public domain and usable by anyone for any purpose.

Two new websites recently launched that give the public unprecedented access to government documents acquired through the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other public disclosure, or "sunshine," laws: GovernmentDocs.org and GovernmentAttic.org.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to sign a bill, S.B.

The Pennsylvania House and Senate are considering new legislation designed to strengthen the state's Open Records Law. This is welcome news, as Pennsylvania's current law is one of the most antiquated -- and public-unfriendly -- laws in the country. (It's an indication of Pennsylvania's disregard for public access that I had to link to the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association's website for the current version of the law because the state's legislative website does not include laws enacted prior to 1975, and the Pennsylvania law came about in 1957.)

There are currently three Open Records reform bills pending in the Pennsylvania House and Senate: HB 443, introduced by Rep. Tim Mahoney; SB 1, introduced by Sen. Dominic Pileggi; and SB 765, introduced by Sen. Jim Ferlo.

The Evening Bulletin, which does a good job comparing the three versions, is sanguine that a reform bill will pass this session:

A major obstacle standing between proposed reform and passage is the reformers themselves. They all appear to agree on the need for more access to public records, but they don't all agree on how it should be accomplished. It is more difficult to find and acquire public records in Pennsylvania than just about anywhere else in the country.Legislators, terrorized by the threat of being cast and perceived in an election year as against reform, appear ready to vote for open records reform.

To help recalcitrant legislators do the right thing, the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association and PassOpenRecords.org are sponsoring a public "PA Open Records Challenge." Let's hope they succeed in pushing through a reform bill. It's long overdue.

The New York Times reports that Carl Malamud and his non-profit organization, Public.Resource.Org, have begun an ambitious campaign to make US court decisions available to the public for free online. According to its website, Public.Resource.Org seeks to create an "unencumbered public repository of federal and state case law and codes." To do this, Malamud will be scanning West Publishing's federal and state case reporters,"extracting the public domain content and republishing it on the Internet for use by anyone." Malamud has already started with West's Federal Supplement, Federal Reporter, and Federal Appendix. So far, only cases from the 1880s are up on the website.

Interestingly, Malamud has a successful history of challenging publishers and getting government information released to the public. In the 1990s, he spearheaded a campaign that led to the US government making records from the Securities and Exchange Commission (EDGAR) and the Patent and Trademark Office available to the public for free.

Lawyers have long anticipated a move of this kind because court decisions and statutes are not copyrightable. West Publishing and its primary competitor, LexisNexis, do not own the copyrights to the decisions that they publish in print or post to their subscription-based online services. Rather, the publishers own the copyrights only to the content that they add to the published opinions, such as syllabi (which summarize the general holding of each opinion), head notes (which summarize specific points of law discussed in each opinion), and "key numbers" (which categorize points of law into different legal topics and subtopics for research purposes). They also own the copyrights to the particular selection and arrangement of the opinions in their case reporter volumes. This is a relatively thin layer of copyrightable material -- it is fairly clear that a competitor or interested citizen could copy and distribute cases found in West's reporters, so long as the syllabi, head notes, and "key numbers" were redacted, and so long as the reproductions did not duplicate the West reporters' original selection and arrangement of cases. See, e.g., Matthew Bender & Co. v. West Publishing, 158 F.3d 674 (2d Cir. 1998), cert. denied, 526 U.S. 1154 (1999).

Written by Tom Casazzone, CMLP Intern

GovernmentExecutive.com is reporting that the CIA has adopted a new definition of "news media" that could significantly reduce the fees and costs for citizen journalists who request documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

That is the question that Jason Fry raises in a provocative column in the Wall Street Journal Online. Fry writes that:

Property deeds, marriage and divorce records, court files, motor-vehicle information and tax documents are increasingly being digitized, and contain a wealth of information that few of us would want online: Social Security numbers, birth dates, maiden names and images of our signatures. Local governments have rushed to put those documents online for a decade or so, often without scrubbing them of such information. And that's made them potentially fertile ground for busybodies, stalkers and identity thieves.

I have no doubt that this comes as a shock to many people. But it shouldn't. The records being put online are public. They are available to anyone willing to schlep to the courthouse or county clerk. As Fry notes, "[o]pen records are a longstanding American tradition."