Law online
Last week’s announcement about the Stanford IP Litigation Clearinghouse really was exciting. A little more information about it:
The IPLC, which will open to the public this fall, is a comprehensive collection of information about IP cases. The patent module has over 23,000 cases filed in the U.S. district courts since 2000. We report a variety of information about each case, and give scholars access to the key documents in each case. We are also posting a variety of statistical data about these patent cases on an ongoing basis. Future modules will expand our coverage to include copyright, trademark, and ultimately trade secret cases.
I wonder how they did it. Each court makes docket sheets available (and documents) online, but the documents are expensive (if you’re getting a lot of them) and the interface is clumsy (the PACER service). PACER says:
Each court maintains its own databases with case information. Because PACER database systems are maintained within each court, each jurisdiction will have a different URL. Accessing and querying information from each service is comparable; however, the format and content of information provided may differ slightly.
Somehow those clever people at Stanford found a way to pull all of those different databases together. That’s quite a development - a huge contribution.
Speaking of law online, here’s a link to the Independent Government Observers Task Force: IGOTF. Also very interesting and exciting, also making public information more public.
And I can’t leave this post without a nod to the OpenCRS project - if only a full set of these documents was routinely made available to all of us online.