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ElliottPaper1Quotes 8 - 08 Nov 2008 - Main.ElliottAsh
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Lexis and WestLaw? do not provide services to public libraries.
53 Vill. L. Rev. 1, 24 | | | | |
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It would be argued that law has expressive, aesthetic content and is thus deserving of copyright. By virtue of the fact that some judges, as composers of legal materials, [[cite]evidently believe this, there is some truth to the argument. But it is an unfortunate attitude, and it has deleterious effects on the quality of the fruits of legal enterprise. Law should be conceived as software code rather than poetry, written by legislators, compiled by the executive, and debugged by the courts. This metaphor offers hints as to how problems with the legislative versus executive versus judicial process should be dealt with. For example, as illustrated in [[cite][Anarchism Triumphant], anarchical production of software code is a superior strategy, and it should be applied to the production of legislation. The [[cite][GPLv3 process] is a preliminary example of an anarchical legal drafting process.
When law is proprietized, an obvious concern would be manipulation of the law by its private owners for their personal benefit. It would be rational, supposing low probability of the infraction being publicized, for Elsevier/Thomson to tamper with case law concerning company litigation. In a competitive legal-information marketplace, objectivity would be an overriding concern, because competitors would publicize infractions and keep each database honest. But here, we have duopoly, and that invites collusion. There has been little, if any, investigation into whether Thomson and Elsevier have attempted such manipulation. An investigation into whether cases in which Elsevier/Thomson (and subsidiaries) are parties are characterized by statistical differences in the database's meta-information is in order. What we do know, in the meantime, is that Elsevier has, at least once, manipulated a scientific medical publication for economic reasons.
The problems with Lexis and Westlaw are representative of the more general problems associated with the proprietization of functional knowledge. Bergstrom (2001) showed that nonprofit economics journals were generally superior to commercial economics journals, despite the fact that similar commercial journals charged almost ten times as much for subscriptions to their journals.
Law journals should be the first organizations to sign onto the free-law effort. Since they are locked in libraries and . On the one hand, this circumstance protects them from being widely read and thereby condemned for incompetence. But, as demonstrated in Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, there is demand, however small, for a virtually infinite range of creative and functional content (pg. ). By unlocking the storage and meta-connection of law journal articles, the free-law effort would facilitate the synthesis of wider blocks of information and argument.
Another objection to the free platform is that private actors would manipulate the meta-information to sabotage opposing legal actions. Wikipedia, again, is a testament to the growth of internal safeguards against abuses.
-- ElliottAsh - 08 Nov 2008 | | | |
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