Re: West loses major copyright decision

Andrew Martin <amartin[_at_]cancopy.com> wrote:
>
> What I find intriguing in these discussions is that no-one seems
> to be giving any thought to whether commercial publishers will
> continue with services that, effectively, can be ripped off by
> competitors, who have invested absolutely nothing. Leaving aside
> any desire to beat up on West, any your interests really advanced
> if the larger law publishers decide to abandon what are obviously,
> for practitioners and academics, key areas of publishing?

It was interesting to see the message from Mr. Martin, Executive Director Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency. After news of the West loss, I received a telephone call from some in Canada who reported that in Canada the legal publishers including Thomson/Carswell were attempting to obtain a fee each time a lawyer copied a court opinion from privately published case reports in her/his office, even though the court opinions were works of the court. Is Mr. Martin aware of these efforts?

If Mr. Martin is correct that the publishers stop doing this, then the Government will have to do what it should do anyway and take responsibility for publishing positive law. The US Congress publishes its statutes and the US Code. Is there any difference with court opinions?

The outcome of this decision will be that publishers will have no incentive to continue to undercut and debilitate government efforts to publish its own core information and to stop private interest from essentially bribing government agencies to enter into tacit agreements to help particular publishers in return for receiving free or reduced cost access to the books and databases produced by the private entity. The private publishers will have to do something creative, and creative does not mean creative approaches to persuading public officials to abandon their public obligations.

Does anyone doubt that any court with half an interest could maintain permanent archives of all of its opinions on the WEB with simple indexing to the date, docket number, and name of case?? This would be a blip on the budget of most courts, and, guess what, the other courts and other government agencies would save by having access to this information.

Maybe even the US Supreme Court could figure out a way to get out an immediate official citation without waiting two or three years for the US Reports to appear, so that everyone is not forced into using West's Supreme Court Reporter which becomes the de facto standard. Is this too much to ask of the Court?

Alan

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:: Alan D. Sugarman       Federal Appeals on Disc tm CD-ROM  ::
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