Re: West (was:HR830 - Anyone tracking this?)

>-    House republicans introduce legislation with a section
>     requested by West Publishing that will provide sweeping
>     changes in federal freedom of information act, and prevent
>     federal agencies from creating a public database that use
>     the West Publishing page numbers to reference case law.

Well, the West citation system *is* proprietary, without a doubt.
This is a case where ease-of-use has completely dominated. Court
records are completely laced with West citations.

>-    The "West Provision" would also end its lawsuit with Tax
>     Analyst, a Virginia publisher, who is seeking access to the
>     Department of Justice JURIS database of court decisions in
>     order to put the information into the public domain.  Tax
>     Analysts alleges the JURIS database of court decisions are
>     subject to FOIA and not protected by copyright.  A victory
>     by Tax Analysts in this case will lead to a public domain
>     database of federal court decisions.

The Tax Analyst lawsuit: destined to fail from the start.
If they want to do this they will have to come up with their own
indexing/citation system, and then get everyone to adapt to it.
About as likely as putting 73v AC wiring in every home in America.

Hmm, 
how hard could it be to eliminate West page numbers?

There couldn't be more than a couple of cases on each page, 
if each page number were replaced by links to each case, a
lawyer could tell on the first glance which of the three was
right and mark it, assuming a reasonable HTML/SGML editor or
something.  Seems like it could be done as a part of daily work
and the results accreted somewhere.
-- 
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