The New York Times has a story about how the Harvard Law School is doing what almost no library has ever done before in order to prepare for the digital age. It's painful for me as a book lover to read this story but it's all for a good cause:
[I]n a digital-age sacrifice intended to serve grand intentions, the Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner. They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually must be paid for. [...]
For many years now, bookcases of legal tomes in law offices have been mostly for show. Rather than spending days poring over book indexes and footnoted citations, as law clerks and associates did in earlier times, researchers find what they need on the Internet in minutes. But that nearly always comes at a price. [...]
Legal groups spend anywhere from thousands of dollars a year, for a small office, to millions, for a giant firm, using commercial services like Westlaw and LexisNexis to find cases and trace doctrinal strands. [...]
Complete state results will become publicly available this fall for California and New York, and the entire library will be online in 2017, said Daniel Lewis, chief executive and co-founder of Ravel Law, a commercial start-up in California that has teamed up with Harvard Law for the project. The cases will be available at www.ravellaw.com. Ravel is paying millions of dollars to support the scanning. The cases will be accessible in a searchable format and, along with the texts, they will be presented with visual maps developed by the company, which graphically show the evolution through cases of a judicial concept and how each key decision is cited in others.
While this sounds like this is just another way to make money from public domain legal documents and court opinions (and it is), there is an important distinction:
Under the agreement with Harvard, the entire underlying database, not just limited search results, will be shared with nonprofit organizations and scholars that wish to develop specialized applications. Ravel and Harvard will withhold the database from other commercial groups for eight years. After that, it will be available to anyone for any purpose....
So, geeks such as myself who have some modicum of legal training have some time to put on their thinking caps and find ways of making money out of this information. For everyone else, this could be a way of evening out the playing field in court cases, when the Davids goes after Goliath
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2015, @05:27PM
Google released the plans, and offered to license the patents, for the scanner it used for its Google Books project. My assumption is that that would include U.S. patent 7508978, which is a technique for projecting a pattern onto the pages of an open book, and using the image of that pattern as picked up by stereoscopic cameras to correct for the curvature of the pages.
https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/13/3639016/google-books-scanner-vacuum-diy [theverge.com]
https://www.google.com/patents/US7508978 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2015, @05:30PM
I suppose I should add: with Google's patented technique, there's no need to cut the pages out of books so that they can be made flat. The flattening is done with image processing.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday October 30 2015, @06:19PM
Right, and Google would do it for most libraries for free.
But these books have no real value, they become obsolete and outdated before they are shipped from the publisher.
Furthermore they probably still carry copyrights. One wonders how the University will get around that.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2015, @07:43PM
Arguably the paper format is obsolete, but if the books are outdated and have no real value, there would be no need to digitize them, other than to create busy-work. The article calls the collection "priceless" and says that millions of dollars are being spent on this effort.
You raise a good question about copyright. I don't know the answer, but earlier this month, a federal appeals court found [theatlantic.com] that what Google Books is doing is permissible as fair use. Also, the DMCA allows libraries to make digital copies--so long as the library is not-for-profit and the copies can only be viewed on its premises:
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday October 30 2015, @08:13PM
But right away, you can see that Harvard is planning to go beyond that:
Under the agreement with Harvard, the entire underlying database, not just limited search results, will be shared with nonprofit organizations and scholars that wish to develop specialized applications. Ravel and Harvard will withhold the database from other commercial groups for eight years. After that, it will be available to anyone for any purpose....
Maybe these are the historical copies of law books that exist in no other form, and are already nearing the end of copyright.
But the story suggests that law books in law offices are simply for show, and that is largely true.
Several lawyers I worked for had walls full of books they never use, and upon close inspection they are all hopelessly out of date.
And one was using an early form of these: http://www.originalbooks.net/faux-book-panels [originalbooks.net] purchased from a movie prop company when he worked in LA. Now they are a commercial thing. He was an all digital office, and had no actual need of the real books.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mendax on Friday October 30 2015, @08:25PM
Law books are never outdated. Oh sure, the law changes, court opinions overrule earlier decisions, idiot politicians change statutes, but sometimes it's important to know about these earlier decisions, to know about how the law used to be. Despite the principle of stare decisis, which states once an issue is decided it remains decided, that is not always the case as the U.S. Supreme Court has shown on several occasions when it has declined to follow its own precedents.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2015, @10:24PM
if the laws can be copyrighted, we are so far past anything resembling sanity that phonebooks and recipes are probably under copyright as well. I am copyrighting this comment on copyright, and preemptively copyright any comment anyone may make on my comment as a derivative work.
(Score: 2) by physicsmajor on Friday October 30 2015, @06:21PM
Of course, the real solution is to dramatically simplify the US Code. Google 'three felonies a day' if you genuinely don't think this is needed.
However, making case law freely accessible is also necessary to a functional, free society.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Friday October 30 2015, @06:36PM
Actually, its case law that keeps lawyers in business.
The law doesn't mean what is written in the statute. It means what some judge ruled in some obscure case somewhere, which becomes precedent everywhere until some other judge of different authority or jurisdiction rules otherwise.
The laws in this, (and most) countries are a tattered sham. They are never brought into agreement with case law. In this computer age there is really no reason for this situation to still exist.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by unzombied on Friday October 30 2015, @08:57PM
Ya know, as long as they're doing this, could someone please copy/paste all the "insert the following phrase before Book seven Chapter eighteen Section IV paragraph c second sentence beginning with 'party of second part'" to where they belong?