 And I think this next section is going to be so much short that we can be able to get done a reasonable amount of time here. And, you know, there's going to be a lot of room for discussion on this stuff. We're not trying to ram it through, but we're just trying to. I found with these, went through this exercise with Larry Lessig and the bulk data principles that, you know, at some point you can over-solve these problems at an index level. And if you can agree on the high-level buckets, then there's a lot of time to go into the next level now. Oh, I'll take that. Okay, so the first thing we were looking at was the definition of what we meant by primary legal materials. And if you remember right, that was a two-part definition. It meant that documents of primary authority issued by governmental bodies such as court opinions, laws, and regulations. And I do want to pull up my copy of Dorkin and a couple of the other books on, you know, what is the law. But I think that makes sense, right? I can bring these to the work statutes to laws. Okay, I'm fine with that. Because it's all the law, you know, right? Well, it depends if you're talking to under-to-law students or general public. Well, I'm talking to judges here, so we need to be precise. Hold on there. Judges and general counsels and law libraries. And then part B is the one that we've occasionally had issues because when you first came in with the national inventory of primary legal materials, a lot of law libraries said you meant primary authority, and therefore it must just be statutes. And I'm firmly convinced that if you're doing congressional, you know, statutes, you've got to do the hearings because when you go to court, and I'm not a lawyer, if you go to court and you're arguing a law, the first thing you pull out is that committee report that says here's what the Congress meant. So part two is supporting documents issued and maintained by those bodies, such as briefs, forms, and hearing records. And perhaps an FAQ to that one says this is a slippery slope as we move from the heights down into the municipalities and attorney general opinions or those considered primary legal materials or not. Yeah, at the risk of being exactly what you said you wanted us to do, I consider legislative history to be secondary authority, but because it's a product of the government, it's something that should be included here. That's why I say supporting documents issued and maintained by those bodies. Okay, okay. What was your, I guess I actually have a slide, I'm on more of a video. I'm sorry. Can you read the first part of your slide again? Okay, so first part is documents of primary authority issued by governmental bodies, such as court opinion statutes and regulations. Okay. Part two is supporting documents issued and maintained by those governmental bodies, such as briefs, forms, and hearing, and instead of hearing records, legislative history. And we can tweak the for example list. And then again, in the FAQ, the slippery slope acknowledgment that, you know, this gets harder and harder to define as you get down to your local justice of the piece. And, you know, I'm not sure the full transcript of every justice of the piece session makes sense to have available, particularly if they don't have a record of the session, correct? Right. It doesn't make sense to say let's not include these things. It makes sense to take our suggestion of let's start with what's used the most. And as demand for things increases, maybe the list will expand. Yeah, okay. So that's pretty easy. Now we've got two more pieces to get through. One is the five non-technical principles. And I think a couple of these are pretty simple. And maybe an issue of how we term them. And one is that fees for dissemination of primary legal materials are inherently inequitable and should be avoided. Is that not strong enough? I mean, I'm basically trying to say, I think the pacer paywall should be abolished because I believe it is contrary to public policy and it discriminates. And to me it is a poll tax on access to justice. And I didn't want to use that word because that sets off all sorts of bells. A accurate statement that places a burden on us to do all the cost modeling stuff that was talked about this morning. Because inevitably when you propose that, you're going to get a response and say, well, yeah, but we've been covering costs of this with user access. But where does the money come from? And at that point you need to have a pretty accurate catalog of where it does come from. I either read it or regret it. Or a pretty good policy organism. Look, this ought to be a public good. So to the epilogue, I was going to add a cost thing. Talking about the money in very general principles. But I think that has to be dealt with. But are we agreed that fees on the dissemination side are kind of a core issue here? That fees for filing fees we're not really dealing with. And there's all sorts of indirect ways of assessing fees like taxes. We have mechanisms for that. But it's the page per page fees or the monthly subscription fees that have that dramatic effect. And I say it should be avoided. So if it's $100 to get the CMR and I can repurpose it, I think it's a stupid business model because I'll buy one copy and everyone will then use mine. But I'm fine with $100. In fact, for government videotapes, there's no restriction on use. I mean, there's a bunch of DVDs from the government that are a dollar each on firefighting and they just haven't made them available. And so I bought them all and I put them on YouTube. And the fact that I had to pay a buck didn't bother me. The fact that I paid $39,000 a year for patents is, on the other hand, a problem. Plus the dollar for the physical DVD. Massachusetts Statutes talked about these charges were physical copies you take away or for the later involved in finding them in the archives. But once they've mounted it on the web for free, they've already done that. Yeah, I mean that's fair. That's why they should be avoided rather than saying they're unconstitutional or absolutely verboten. But if you're going to charge a fee for dissemination, you ought to really look twice. And the fee should be no more than the marginal cost of distribution. I was just thinking that that phrase needs to be in the law. Okay, thank you, marginal cost. And there, we're going to be clear that we're not against fees per se, but we need to look at their impact. And particularly Pacer, where the fee for doing a district court is a couple million bucks, then that becomes an issue. And that's certainly much more than the marginal cost. I don't want to set this spinning into the stratosphere necessarily, but I'm wondering if we can envision a situation in which we would ever want to distinguish between individuals accessing stuff for personal purposes and large data aggregators. So Peter Wynn at the Department of Justice kind of went down this road. So Peter Wynn went down this road saying, well, do you want to throw a license agreement that essentially said if you're a big commercial re-user, you've got to pay a lot of money, but if you're not, then you don't pay money. And the problem I have with that one is, okay, so let's say I get it for nothing and I make it available for anonymous FTP, which I do with all my data. Presumably West is just going to come to me. Now, there might be a requirement saying that West may not come to me and I have to license my data because I can get it for free, but I can only allow it for non-commercial use. And the problem I had there is that's an incredible slippery slope of deciding what's allowed and what isn't allowed and it really gets into the regulating data business. And we start to get into the situation you have at the Smithsonian Institution in which, you know, their data's all public, but you have to ask for permission to use it and they'll decide whether or not you're in allowable use or not. And then they tell you, well, you can use it, but you can only use it on your website for one year. You can't allow people to download it. You've got to impose a license agreement. And that, to me, at the primary legal material level seems a non-starter. I must tell you a funny story. I denunciated that old idea in a seminar for now where he was talking about it as a close analogy to the public industries and one of the people who was in the seminar started to say, yeah, but the Bureau of Mines never had to deal with an army of miners differently dressed in each arm of the tea space. And about a month later, recast started. I've denounced you to a lot of the commons where you're allowed to take a certain amount and no more. You've got 20 files and that's it. So you get three laws and no more? Or whatever one person can reasonably use for themself not to be selling to other people. See, that's a problem with that slippery slope because I'm on it all, right? And I want to audit it for privacy violations and I want to publish the cleaned up version of PACER and I want to do it for free because I think I have a right to do so. That's your personal idea? Yeah, and I see myself as no different than a prisoner who wants to, like, you know, take all the documents on his case and post it on his blog. And how do you make me different from the prisoner? Assuming I'm not arrested. So principle number two, I hope we don't have long as that. Who kind of generally agreed that this is going to need to be glossed heavily, obviously. Principle number two is copyright on primary legal materials are contrary to one standing public policy, period. FAQ, contract contractual restrictions that attempt to accomplish those same goals are also contrary to one standing public policy. Are there any issues with that one? And these two principles, by the way, are the primary goal of law. Everything else is window dressing because if the data becomes available, we'd rather they get it. On the other hand, if the Supreme Court can't get it together and we can get the breeze and the oral arguments, Jerry Goldman's done a wonderful job with the OAA project, and I think it's better that the Supreme Court do it. But the core issue is that the data is not available. The secondary issue is that it's not available from the source in a way that befits the dignity of our system of laws. But the core issue that brought a lot of us into this world is that it just wasn't available, period. Okay, point three, final authoritative text and word possible source codes such as XML should be available without restriction. And that's the one that we know we're going to have to do lots of FAQs. And remember, that's two issues we're dealing with here. One is the slip opinion is available, but the final opinion is only available from the report. And I've tried to say this in a way that didn't say commercial concession error and vendor. And then the second issue is the problem of not releasing the source code when you could. So PDFs of the Federal Register but the XML not being available. And in fact, a lot of people will do that. They'll perhaps make available the PDFs and then sell the underlying source code. I have to say that one word smithing issue I had that when you first wrote is, I don't know what the hell you're talking about when you say source code. Okay. I'm pretty sure a Federal Register. Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. The other issue is XML. Yeah. Does that stand for that one forever? No, it isn't. That's why I said such as XML. In fact, I'm absolutely not married to XML as the answer. And, you know, kind of best current practices are actually moving away from XML in many cases. If it's a tabular data, JSON is actually much more acceptable in many ways. So... And judges don't know what XML is anyway. So is there a thing you didn't say? Can we say original format? And word possible, the original format? And you might want to show it not proprietary, isn't there, just for the hell of it. Okay. Yeah, I think we need to gloss this one heavily. And I think the reason is, and I think by example, the Federal Register is a good example of that one. I'm worried there. I think it's better to leave that one a little opaque. I think that's one of the ones where the judge or the dean turns to their advisor and says what the hell do they mean by that? Well, it's got to be FAQ and it's got three or four, you know, examples like non-proprietary and XML and, you know, PDF and final form. I mean, it's got to be there, right? It's got to be there in some aspect. This should not be particularly to deal with this with the rules of evidence, right? The civil procedure says electronic documents must be produced in their native form as maintained in the ordinary course of life. Native form. Right? So they got native form is what judges mean when... Because, I mean, frankly, this is like half my life has spent OCRing TIFFs from the other side. 300 page TIFFs, you have to figure out what the multiple of them because they print out a spreadsheet, right? And they tile all of them, you have to figure out what the X by Y columns and rows are. On the other hand, you don't want them doing your favor and treating a bunch of JPEGs. Right, but you want the X to last. When you want the original spreadsheet, that's native form. Right. But if native, I deal with a lot of images and sometimes they think they're doing me a favor and you create a GIF file that's suitable for the web. Same thing with video, right? They have an original format on a beta cam and they give me something that's ready for YouTube. It's, I don't want it ready for YouTube as a 320 by 240. I just switched to work. They were putting them out that way. The reason they did it was that the track changes comments and all the other histories were visible in the original in this Word document. So you're going to actually see which part was right. Which made them a little unhappy. So there may be some sensitivity to the native or underlying language. And so maybe that's again one of those should be applied as appropriate. So for large systems such as a federal register that's one thing. On the other hand, we explicitly say that track changes on a Word document are not necessarily, should be examined to see whether it's appropriate. And again, we're starting with if it's public here's how it should be distributed. We're not dealing with what cases should be sealed and not sealed, right? We're not dealing with that gating decision. So I mean one judge was worried that we wanted the written notes of all the judicial internal conferences released and it's like this is not that kind of a transparency discussion. Okay, that was point three. Point four is an active program of research and development standards research in conjunction with universities and other groups on challenges such as the automated detection and redaction of personal privacy information, PPI. And I could see a lot of different glosses on that with other examples. And we'd love to hear them. Are there other things we're missing in that kind of point which is you should be working with the rest of the world instead of doing this all internally and reinventing the wheel. That's kind of what that comes down to. I've noticed incredible power from the office of the federal register and GPO working with Tom's operation and with Ed Feld's operation at Princeton has just totally changed the quality of the work they're able to do because they're working with some of the best folks in the field. Some comments on that? How about examples of people already working as opposed to this is a list of people who are shopping out. But examples of Princeton and, you know, OFR for example and how that's worked out so well. It's always proven to be funding. Funding? Funding models. Yes. That there really is not much available so through NSF without them getting into a contractual process. It's almost as if they need to be told in some official way that they can have us come to work and pay them back. Well they spend a tremendous amount of money at the federal judicial center for example and yet they're doing no really effective R&D even though they're the R&D arm of the federal judiciary. There's a whole bunch of other administrative rule-making entities out there that could use some of these things. And, you know, it doesn't have to necessarily be both of the money going to university professors. I mean, they're not paying you to do your R&D of our work. It's funny you mentioned the FJC because we actually added the bankruptcy code. Okay, so 0.5, I had access to the law should be considered a fundamental right in American democracy but I'd like to take that out and instead have 0.5 be something like we need more education training reference implementation to be out there. So a significantly expanded program of education for court reporters, IT officials and others involved in the mechanics of distribution of primary legal materials, education and training and then that whole reference implementation that we could be putting some software out there that others could build on and use and that's kind of the vision that a good city IT manager might be able to download some code serving software that let them maintain their municipal code or that some value-added vendor like Justia might take that code and build a Drupal plug-in and support that for a fee. But that there needs to be more in the field let's help these people figure out how to get it up and that's the last of the principles. And then we were thinking there's two other sections that need to be in there. One is why this is important and then the second was kind of the nod to economics. So why this is important legal education that law students are not getting access to primary legal materials sufficiently gloss on PACER I mean that's pretty simple. Legal research is essentially non-existent on the corpus today. There are a few examples like the IP Clarenhouse out of Stanford but there's a tremendous pent-up demand for people like Yo-Hai Beckler to access the corpus and do more effective things with it. And again an FAQ gloss on that one is privacy audits and the profits on PACER are another example of research that is impossible today. Innovation in the legal market I think that's pretty easy in the standard. Small businesses are not getting access to the legal information they need today both for serving the legal market but just as importantly for being an effective dry cleaner and you know the law today is many greedy regulations and it's difficult to make that information available. International trade in order to be able to trade with the United States more effectively our law should be more transparent. Access to justice both by lawyers and by non-lawyers who are attempting to represent themselves in our court system and democracy and that's where that fundamental right thing kind of got moved to the law and we must obey the law and it needs to be available. Essentially what you said but I think the challenge of critiquing the law people say it says what and go to their representative and say this is crazy you know I've read the law and it says this we need to change it and be able to mobilize people and say hey go to this website and look at what it actually says we should mobilize and change Tim O'Reilly gave an incredibly eloquent 10 minute description of why by making the law available maybe we could debug our legal system that it was incredibly complex today by making it available we could begin systematically walking through that. Vince served challenged him and said oh no no this is not like source code you can't really debug the law how are you going to debug her and a lot of people kind of jumped in and said well but you know a lot of the law are regulations on how much paint can you know how much lead can be in paint and there's going to be 10 different laws on that and maybe we can look at them systematically measure which ones are working and which ones are not and there's a lot of that kind of examination of the complexity particularly of our regulations that would be more readily accessible any other applications being essential to the burdens of our democracy or something you know yeah I think we definitely go up to high level on point 7 there needs to be a couple of needy greedy what's the problem and I love the 63 of 66 law schools cannot access PACER I mean that's pretty like you know fundamental I don't know I call her away she doesn't survey really compliance with the law by everyone I mean a huge amount of what we do in our law libraries is about compliance it's not about illegal grievance it's can I take my windows how loud can my stereo be you know can I have sex now that we have online chat reference we hear from teenagers all the time with sex questions and that's just wanting to you know wanting to legally okay so compliance by small business individuals professionals and citizens is difficult today because it is so hard to access the law and that's different from point 7 which is an informed citizenry and so we're kind of doing that point twice which is okay basic consent to practice the law basic consent to practice the law and then there needs to be a point issue I think drawing on Larry Lessig's talk about why this isn't actually saying we're going to spend a bunch of money this is actually about saving money for government saving money for small business this is about innovation and spin-offs and I haven't phrased those but I could see a list of three or four points this is going to save government money and it's going to well maybe one of the people or entities that is certified so it sounds like we have one is that this will save government money on operations access to the law and MIS basically because we're going to start doing things more standardized and the second is that the process of creating the law will be able to reuse components from other jurisdictions right yes yes and not only that that will reduce the complexity of our legal system a lot less of what jurisdiction do I happen to be in today you know when the alleged crime occurred where was the bus you know did other costs kind of spin-offs or should I just go through Larry's talk and there's been a couple others that have kind of touched on these topics as well okay well we're at 215 next on the agenda was kind of what's next for law.gov and general discussions and comments we can start with anybody have anything to say about the process in general and where we need to bring it do you want to hear from me as to where we think it's going so there is a Google group which is law-dot-gov law-dot-gov you just go to Google groups and you can pull that up there and that's the official mailing list it's mostly been agenda postings up till now a couple little occasional spats on people discussing things but my hope is that it turns into a more general purpose form and certainly that's where the initial draft of these principles would get posted the hope on this process is kind of twofold on one level is to get these principles kind of put together and circulate it and things like the FAQ put together and get it ready get it dean-worthy if you will I will spend most of July and August going through the transcripts of these workshops and attempting to pull out a semi-coher 50-page report for example on authentication references existing work that's out there and has the footnotes that kind of pulls out Phil Malone and Pam Samuelson and Jamie Boyles and Jennifer Jenkins comments on copyright and its history you know some of the external research that I've done and put this together and kind of report format but as part of that we'll also be publishing a transcript from the ones that we have video and the two scripts for the ones that we don't so that there's kind of a big, thick binder that documents the process that we've gone through and then at that point I think the work just begins because at that point it needs to go up to a higher pay grade and we're beginning to do the politicking in Washington to get folks to take it seriously and as you've seen we already have a letter from the Federal Trade Commission and one from the Senate saying please send us the report but you know just getting the report is just the start we really want to get some congressional hearings to be put together to examine the issues and call in some of the experts on some of these topics certainly would like to get some kind of White House attention but then most importantly are going to be all of these different groups that are out there ranging from the ADA and the AAOL to the Association of Court Reporters and that's going to require a whole bunch of people kind of being willing to talk on the subject and the hope is by doing this as a report that we're in a position where quite a few people feel comfortable to be able to document what has happened and some of the conclusions and particularly have a collection of case studies and examples that can be used to counter the this is impossible kind of thing and so that's where I see it going it's a bit nebulous in a way but then in September we begin to kind of roll this out I'll be speaking at O'Reilly's Government 2.0 summit and then September 9th and 10th and I don't know if the report will be all finished by then but I'll certainly be in a position to give a talk and in that talk I will kind of be able at the very least to put the court principles out there on the table and so that's kind of the beginning of the roll out if you will comments that's Sean making the law, do you know what I mean and how is that going to get folded into sort of these cost analysis in terms of looking at jurisdictions that you think have done this right so the whole rulemaking process is really interesting, Cass Sunstein and OMB and Oira are in the process of trying to think and reform that one there is a bill in the Senate now on rulemaking and Tom Bruce of course was involved in the ADA study on that one and interesting issue because in a way we're on the other end of that on the other hand rulemaking is one of the more difficult processes of particularly in the executive branch it's one of the reasons the Federal Trade Commission was quite interested in this activity I don't know specifically how of these court principles for example apply to you know comment dockets by citizens and citizen participation in the rulemaking process I think that's on the input side to the extent that's the official record that counts as our loss on primary legal materials and should therefore be disseminated but as specifically how that relates I don't know I've had a couple meetings with Oira I don't think their thoughts are well enough developed on where they want to bring the rulemaking reform yet I think they're just beginning to deal with that I think they had too many other issues about you know the substance regulations that they wanted to unwind and haven't yet dealt in depth with the how do we reform the rulemaking process so there's a very very clear tie in the access to justice world between the input process of filling out a form and accessing the courts and the dissemination of legal materials those two have to be a full circle and I think that full circle applies more broadly but I'm not quite sure how and I think we want to focus very specifically on the dissemination of primary legal materials so that we need to acknowledge there's a whole bunch of other issues out there but I think somebody was talking about how this is a core enabling infrastructure issue and then there's going to be a whole bunch of other things on top of that and I think our strategy for success is going to have to be based on the focus of we're here to talk about how you disseminate your materials and that has implications on a whole bunch of other parts of your work process but we are not here necessarily to tell you the executive branch or comment or tell you the court how to reform your filing system yes well I mean it's a very simple example with the form you can write the form and scan the form and submit a TIF file or you can have a PDF document that's been filled in with the actual fields that it lets you then turn it back into XML on the other end so yeah there's clearly some implications there the law making process laws has a dramatic impact on how you then disseminate the record of those laws but I do think the focus of our recommendations should be on the dissemination side because that's the fight I think we can win whereas the reform of some of these bigger issues I think are going to spin for a little while and may have many different solutions whereas we're trying to do a standard here we're trying to say if you make the law you must make it available anything else? are we concluding this process? any final comments? Tom, Phil, anything to say? I conclude this season with a workshop there no thank you very much