There's a very long history to the effort to digitize federal and state case law. West, once a private company, sued Lexis/Nexis claiming that their page number

There's a very long history to the effort to digitize federal and state case law. West, once a private company, sued Lexis/Nexis claiming that their page numbers were copyrighted. West lost, and perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, sold itself. The copyrighted material added by their editors were summaries of the cases themselves. But wouldn't these be derivative works, given that most of the time they merely copied key text from the opinion, as opposed to creating an original work? With digitization, the key number system, a valuable finding aid in the analog days, became unnecesary. Whatever happened to the Taxpayers' Assets Program? Or the Department of Justice's Juris system? Perhaps Juris was obtained under license from West or Lexis, but the Air Force had their own system, called FLITE (Federal Legal Information through Electronics). The Assets Program tried to get access to Flite but could never get the Air Force to push the button. Remember that the raw material for all of these cases are the opinions written by federal employees; i.e., federal judges. The opinions themselves cannot be copyrighted. A copyright wrapper around them was permitted. I'm surprised that only three states have made their records available under this program: in Florida it was possible to sign up for the feed and receive a zip file of all "published"(that is, filed) cases every week. More than a few private companies jumped in. It's now possible to get access to one library or another at a fraction of the 1980's cost. The deep dark secret of all of this is that, except for a few clarion cases, you only have to pay attention to the last 400 volumes or so; maybe only the last two hundred volumes of the Federal Reporter, Third Series. The U.S. Reports (not the Supreme Court Reporter, which is inside the copyright wrapper along with the Lawyer's Edition) contains no copyrighted material whatsoever. The basic problem is that there is simply too much law. It is difficult to keep up with the law in a single jurisdiction, and impossible to keep up with the case law written in the whole country.