Legal Publishing is one of the markets that we covered in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series. Here are Part 1 and Part 2.

We identified Legal Publishing as very early in Act 2, meaning that while we see innovation the incumbents are still very much in control. The most fundamental innovation that we identified, the big long wave, was Law.Gov. So we decided to dig a bit deeper to get an update.

Here is the basic mission of Law.Gov:

“Law.Gov is an effort to create a report documenting exactly what it would take to create a distributed registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.

By primary legal materials, we mean all materials that have the force of law and are part of the law-making process including: briefs and opinions from the judiciary; reports, hearings, and laws from the legislative branch; and regulations, audits, grants, and other materials from the executive branch. Creating the system from open source software building blocks will allow states and municipalities to make their materials available as well.”

An Inspiring Mission

If you are new to Law.Gov listen to Carl Malamud’s call to action in September 2009:

The Wheels Of Government Grind Slowly

But they do make progress and the sign of progress is official looking documents:

Deliverables Goals

This is a huge undertaking and Carl Malamud has set some ambitious near term goals:

“It is our goal to deliver, by mid-2010, a detailed report to policy makers in Washington, D.C., including at a minimum:

* Detailed technical specifications for markup, authentication, bulk access, and other aspects of a distributed registry.
* A bill of lading defining which materials should be made available on the system.
* A detailed business plan and budget for the organization in the government running the new system.
* Sample enabling legislation.
* An economic impact statement detailing the effect on federal spending and economic activity.
* Procedures for auditing materials on the system to ensure authenticity.”

Big Support From Law Schools

It is clear that Law Schools will benefit a lot from the open sourcing of legal data from their support as Co-Conveners:

So, What Is The Hold-Up?

What is not to like about Law.gov? Well, if you are a big legal publisher you might view this as a threat, just as the software industry initially viewed open source as a threat.

But the government has the decision-making power here and the public interest is clearly served by what Law.gov is doing.

It turns out that there is a government entity called PACER that charges $0.08 per page for access to court documents. PACER is an acronym for Public Access to Court Electronic Records. It is an electronic access service for United States Federal Courts dockets and documents. The system is managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.

Carl Malamud is on the record criticizing Pacer as reported on this post on the Law Librarian Blog:

“Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.org, instigated the massive download of documents from PACER that led to the suspension of the free PACER pilot program last September, reports John Schwartz in the February 13 New York Times. According to Schwartz, Aaron Swartz downloaded more than 19 million pages from PACER, or approximately 20% of the database, in response to Malamud’s public call for individuals to download PACER documents and have them published on Public.Resource.”

How Can Semantic Web Community Help?

There are four ways that people can help:

1. As citizens, make sure your representatives know you support this – citizens can lobby as well!

2. If you have money, you can give donations. PublicResource.org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

3. You can give a shout out on twitter, your blog or wherever you shout.

4. You can write a cool app that takes this data and makes it really useful. That is probably the most critical of all the ways you can contribute. The data may not be quite ready, but when it is, some entrepreneurs will do great things with this and they will use semantic web technology to make it happen.

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