For years, legal information produced by the public sector dollars has been sold through private enterprise making it accessible, indexed, and organized.
If this isn't something that should be available to the public, I don't know what is.
Also, I think a complete, annotated (links to court opinions) constitution should be a minimal exercise of of Government Openness.
Comments (7)
It seems obvious to me that if the private sector can make money selling the public its own information, then government has failed the whole concept of transparency and openness.
I didn't vote.
Yes, I would like access to that information.
On the other hand, collecting and indexing all that is a huge, expensive job. No one is going to do it for free. I have no idea what it would cost if the government did it.
The cost is not out of reach, and is certainly a better use of our money than giving it away to corporations.
Take back ALL (how many $trillions?) the bail-out rip-offs and put Westlaw on the govt payroll instead? If they would agree, I would agree.
(By the way, was not exactly "our money." All that bail-out money was fake. Our species would not live long enough to pay it off. The economy will collapse, 3/4-or-so of us will die in the resulting famines, plagues, wars, etc., and then the survivors will start over with some new system.)
compnaies such as westlaw , owned by Lexis Nexis have cornered the market on this type of data and have now doubled the price for their "public record data" costing us much more to access a clean file of what we have already paid for as tax payers.
the infomation should be available fee from the government in a standerized form allowing us to access much of what westlaw provides at no cost.
So you say that they are gouging because they have a monopoly. Could we not, in theory at least, address that with existing laws?
Ok, I hit the thumbs-up because the issue deserves attention. But I doubt that making it a free service is realistic.
I didn't say Westlaw was gouging, I said private enterprise is making a profit *because* government failed to provide the information in a reasonable format.
Perhaps they think private industry is handling it, and they are but that is not how it should be.
It should be available to the public. We paid for it. We shouldn't have to buy it again.
Call it a jobs program.