On Tue, 27 May 1997, Terry Carroll <carroll[_at_]tjc.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 23 May 1997, John Kasdan <kasdan[_at_]columbia.edu> wrote:
> > The opinion apparently runs through every element which West claimed
> > to be copyrightable. The element which stood out by its absence was
> > the citation. Has West given up its claim to copyright in its page
> > numbering?
>
> I thought that had been decided (in Hyperlaw's favor) in an earlier
> decision last November.
The most recent Hyperlaw legal victory concerns the issue of ownership to corrections and minor modifications to the text of published court opinions. Hyperlaw is now free to scan the text from the West reporters. (Of course, no one disputes West's ownership of the Key system, or other editorial materials authored by West.) Earlier, Hyperlaw and Times Mirror won in the district court on the issue of the pagination. If these two decisions stand, the entire body of federal (and most state) published caselaw should enter the public domain. The West assertions of copyright to the corrections and the pagination were major barriers. The corrections to text issue was not widely reported or discussed on the Internet, but many experts think it was at least as important as the citation issue.
We tried to gather older court opinions from the court files, and found it extremely difficult, because of the difficulty of locating corrections, misfiled cases, destroyed cases, and the expense of retrieval from the archives. West has claimed that it "owned" the text of opinion it published, which different in minor ways from the text of court opinions found in court files. The differences were due to corrections of errors (often minor grammatical corrections), or style (such as West changing the form of the citations to cases). It is basically impossible to separate the changes that West made on its own from those authorized or directed by the judges.
It would be nice if groups who support this would think about filing amicus briefs in the next round.
Jamie
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