Re: Federal Court System

1. In response to your message, HyperLaw does have a CD-ROM with the opinions of the United States Courts of Appeals -- all 13 circuits with over 21,000 opinions from 1993 and 1994. We include the first page citation from the Federal Reporter. We do not include. the internal pages.
2. Your legal analysis is close to the mark. One year ago exactly, Matthew Bender & Company initiated an action against West Publishing Company in the Southern District of New York seeking a declaratory judgment action that West did not have a valid copyright in the internal pagination. HyperLaw, which has its offices in New York City as well, intervened in the action and also seeks a declaratory judgment that among other things, West has no valid copyright to the "corrected" text of the court opinions as they appear in West case reports. West has moved to dismiss both Mathew Bender's and HyperLaw's complaints on the grounds that there is no case or controversy. Among other things, West contends that the view that West would sue a publisher for using its internal page numbers is "paranoia", and that accordingly it would not be reasonable for a publisher to be apprehensive of being sued ... so that there would be no justiciable case or controversy.

In August 1994, after a two month stay requested by West and Matthew Bender, those two parties announced that they had reached a settlement in principle and were negotiating the documents. The court stayed the litigation as to those parties for a couple of months ... West and Bender still have not filed settlement papers with the court. The motion to dismiss HyperLaw, oppostion, and reply were filed in October, 1994. Both parties requested oral argument. Oral argument has not been scheduled. In the meantime, the court just ruled that HyperLaw could not file a motion for summary judgment until the Court ruled upon the motion to dimiss.

Alan Sugarman
President
HyperLaw, Inc.
sugarman[_at_]panix.com
212-787-2812

On Sun, 5 Feb 1995, Keith Lipman wrote:
>
> I have once again recently priced the cost of getting Federal
> Court decisions on CD-ROM from West or Mitchie and choked at the cost.
> I however have recently noticed several legal publishers who are
> selling U.S. Supreme Court decisions on CD-ROM very reasonably priced.
> These publishers state very specifically that the information was
> derived from the Official US Reporter. I have spoken to some of these
> publishers about why they do not put together a CD-ROM for the Circuit
> and District Courts. The answer is usually that the company fears a
> lawsuit for copyright infringment from West. The issue being that West
> assets that it owns the pagination of F.2d/F.3d and F. Supp. In light
> of the Feist decision and the West v. Mead Data Star Paging opinion,
> what is the current state of the law; should any corporation hold a
> monopoly over US case law; and is there any legislative move to
> eliminate west's supposed copyright?
>
> My spin is that since the Feist decision which eliminated the sweat of
> the brow theory from copyright, West has no rights in the pagination of
> case law. Additionally, from a policy standpoint, I believe that
> everyone should access to the law cheaply. Therefore, we should
> statutorily eliminate any rights to the pagination of court decisions,
> and allow free competition in the publication of court decisions.
>
> Keith Lipman, Esquire
> klipman[_at_]lklesq.com
Received on Tue Feb 07 1995 - 01:37:15 GMT