Building the Legal Commons

Free resources hero Carl Malamud is responsible for another coup: As announced on the public.resource.org site, he has negotiated a deal to buy a chunk of federal case reports and make them available totally freely — expressly public domain (using a new CC tool we’re releasing in December that makes it clear that there are no rights — copyright, moral, publicity, etc. — attached to content). This is a brilliant step to a properly accessible public domain. Bravo to Carl!

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4 Responses to Building the Legal Commons

  1. Dana Powers says:

    This is fantastic news! Thanks to all involved.

  2. David Weller says:

    I am just amazed at the increasing speed of the release of government databases. These help the citizen access government information, to make the right decisions about their next letter to their representative, next letter to the editor, next FOIA research, or just to see how your interesting bill is doing in Congress. There are some social interaction development in some of these “databases” as well. Thanks for the heads-up, and I’m interested in adding this new case reports link to my All Things Reform activist blog.

  3. David Staub says:

    This is a great step. Does this fact that this is “a one-time purchase of a copy of data” as stated in the announcement mean that there are no plans to update the recent cases in this database?

  4. Lluis Faus says:

    Great news!
    Thank you very much Carl and Ed.

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