MediaBerkman

Radio Berkman 129: I Bought the Law

September 4th, 2009

Steve Schultze is a busy fellow. He is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He recently joined the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy as Associate Director. He also is one of the developers behind RECAP – an ambitious and provocative project that seeks to bring publicly available digital court records out from behind a costly paywall.

What is RECAP? Find out on this week’s episode!

And why are there fees for court records? Steve also just dropped a great working paper that goes into more detail on the topic.

If you’re in Washington, DC next week catch Steve’s talk on RECAP at the O’Reilly Gov 2.0 conference on Tuesday, September 8.

Naturally we think Steve will make a terrific addition to the Princeton team — congrats, Steve! — and, while we’re sad to lose him, we’re looking forward to stronger ties to CITP and opportunities to collaborate and partner in the future.

Listen:
or download
…also in Ogg!

Reference Section:
Find out about PACER and the RECAP project
Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy
Steve’s blog

CC-licensed music this week:
Neurowaxx – Pop Circus
General Fuzz – Acclimate

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See a partial transcript after the jump.

Radio Berkman 129: I Bought the Law

Is the law free? The answer to this question and more on this week’s Radio Berkman.

[INTERLUDE]

We know that the law is of, by and for the people of the United States. But that doesn’t mean you can read it for free. The court cases and judicial records that interpret laws and statutes fill millions of pages and gigabytes of server space. Serving up all that info, and making it searchable, is a costly enterprise.

But it’s getting cheaper – with the costs for server space dropping, and the proven willingness of crowds to help manage and curate data for free – you’d think it would also be cheap or free to find court records.

And you’d be wrong.

In fact, the judicial system’s online legal database – called PACER – charges a fee for attorneys, law students, anyone who wants to – just to look at case law.

But this information is technically free – free as in free speech – so anyone is allowed to look at it, copy it, distribute it as they wish.

One new project is seeking to make the information free – free as in free beer. The project is called RECAP – and came out of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy.

Steve Schultze is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a developer for Recap, and a frequent guest on this program. He is leaving Berkman to become the Associate Director of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy – but he joined David Weinberger one last time to explain the Recap project and the prickly legal line it walks.

[EXCERPTS]

You can download the RECAP Firefox extension – just visit http://www.recapthelaw.org.

Steve Schultze is the new Associate Director of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy and a developer of RECAP. We wish him all the best in New Jersey, and hope he’ll come back to visit.

Radio Berkman is produced by me Daniel Dennis Jones at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge.

MUSIC:
Neurowaxx – Pop Circus
General Fuzz – Acclimate

Metadata:

PACER: http://pacer.psc.uscourts.gov/

Schultze announcement: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/steve-schultze-join-citp-associate-director

Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy http://citp.princeton.edu/

Recap: https://www.recapthelaw.org/about/

http://managingmiracles.blogspot.com/2009/09/my-new-working-paper-on-pacer.html

http://managingmiracles.blogspot.com

http://www.gov2expo.com/gov2expo2009/public/schedule/detail/10445

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