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They have to digitize, in part, because all of the states have exclusive publication/etc agreements with westlaw or lexis or .... So you can't get a feed of ca

They have to digitize, in part, because all of the states have exclusive publication/etc agreements with westlaw or lexis or .... So you can't get a feed of cases from pretty much anywhere, and often, you aren't allowed to bulk download, etc. Plenty of folks have digitized all the data harvard is talking about here. They are not first. Carl malamud, for example, has scanned all the federal reporters and tons and tons of other cases. http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/08/carl-malamud-takes-on-westlaw.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/08/carl-malamud-takes-on-westl... and https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/ https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/ (My experience here is from back in the early 2000's working on getting pacer/states/etc to open up all of this data, so we could get it into google scholar and elsewhere. Often, they were willing to sell it to us, but they would not let us pay them pretty much any amount of money to make it just open and freely available, which is what we really wanted. Things have not gotten better, sadly, and in fact, have gotten worse)

smallreader 11y ago
You need pre-internet cases from the era before courts had websites. Also, court rules generally require citation formats that use page numbers from the official reporters. In the past, the West has actually unsuccessfully tried to claim copyright to its page numbers (West Publishing Co. v. Mead Data Central, 799 F.2d 1219). There is a lot of other editorial content that actual legal researchers really kind of need, but which they are going to redact because it isn't part of the reported decisions and is owned by the publisher. (Things like unofficial syllabi, indexed lists of holdings, subject matter, etc.)
kemitchell 11y ago
I also tried and failed to "buy out" existing scans for permissive public licensing about five years ago. I actually approached the Law Library Microsoft Consortium, which none of the librarians I knew were even aware of, and couldn't get anywhere. Frankly, even now, with Harvard announcement in hand, I doubt I could. It just wasn't a thing the institution knew how to do. "Does not compute." I'm sorry to hear things have gotten worse.
- kemitchell 11y ago
  Autocorrection changed "Microfilm" to "Microsoft".

smallreader 11y ago

You need pre-internet cases from the era before courts had websites. Also, court rules generally require citation formats that use page numbers from the official reporters. In the past, the West has actually unsuccessfully tried to claim copyright to its page numbers (West Publishing Co. v. Mead Data Central, 799 F.2d 1219). There is a lot of other editorial content that actual legal researchers really kind of need, but which they are going to redact because it isn't part of the reported decisions and is owned by the publisher. (Things like unofficial syllabi, indexed lists of holdings, subject matter, etc.)

kemitchell 11y ago

I also tried and failed to "buy out" existing scans for permissive public licensing about five years ago. I actually approached the Law Library Microsoft Consortium, which none of the librarians I knew were even aware of, and couldn't get anywhere. Frankly, even now, with Harvard announcement in hand, I doubt I could. It just wasn't a thing the institution knew how to do. "Does not compute." I'm sorry to hear things have gotten worse.

kemitchell 11y ago
Autocorrection changed "Microfilm" to "Microsoft".