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In fairness to free.law which appears to provide unrestricted bulk access and uses open formats, what stops anyone, including the blog author, from downloading
by aplorbust 9y ago
In fairness to free.law which appears to provide unrestricted bulk access and uses open formats, what stops anyone, including the blog author, from downloading the bulk data, and then uploading to the Internet Archive?
To some users, it is actually preferable to have bulk access to raw data than thousands of individual html pages on a www server. Because for some it may be less work to transform the raw data into some other format, e.g., 1000s of pages of html, than it is to scrape all those html pages from a www server, process and store them in a searchable format.
Consider raw text versus PDF. PDF may look great but text is more flexible and more easily searchable. While its easy to convert text to PDF for reading, converting from PDF to text for searching is fraught with difficulty and a high margin for error.
If one accepts
more difficult: PDF -> text
less difficult: text -> PDF
then it stands to reason that text is the more preferable format to start with. Because its both easy to search and easy to generate PDF for aesthetics and reading.