 So for our next session we have Tim Stanley and Erica Wayne, if you guys come up to the front. Erica is the Deputy Law Librarian at Stanford Law. Has been a strong player in helping get this national inventory of legal materials off the ground. Tim Stanley is the CEO of Justia, but he was previously the founder of Five Law, which as we know is one of the premier services that West provides. Tim has been active in putting information on the internet since 1993, I think, is when you started your operation, if not earlier. I had a final previous to that. So absolutely. And so we've asked him to talk today about the national inventory of legal materials to describe what it is, but also to focus particularly on the situation in California. So Erica, I'll let you take over. You've got about 30 minutes and then we're going to break for lunch. Tim, I assume you'll let's pick up. Okay. So, I don't know, I guess for purposes of that. And we just get started. So California Chief Justice Ronald George recently wrote a Golden Gate University law review. We cannot afford to operate in an electronic tower of babble. And even though Chief Justice George was only referring to California's courts case management system, the tower of babble frustration, I think, is this for anyone attempting to do legal research right now. And many of the things that are primary legal research materials are not freely available. What is free often carries a warning that can't be relied upon, that it isn't official. For every state, there are different vendor relationships when it comes to publishing the code and insertion of copyright. And kind of in our opinion, we think that the, and I say are, good people, it's different. We feel that a lot of the concept behind a lot of that might help us in that confusion. So, for law.gov to work, a group of librarians are really interested in helping promote this national inventory of primary legal materials. We think it will really kickstart a lot of the law.gov initiative. And the inventory for what it's worth is definition. It's going to be like a packing list, describing, detailing, cataloging, where you can find the laws of our federal and state systems, and then some. I'm going to say then some. It's not just what we consider primary. We know the availability of those things that are created along the way in that process. Things like briefs, hearings, things of that sort. And for what it's worth, the definition I like to use for primary authority comes from Elise Fox's legal research dictionary. And she just says that primary authority is the law itself. The authority that issues from one of the branches of federal, state, or local government as part of its function or issues from the Constitution. There are other definitions, but that was a nice, simple one. And at the first law.gov event back in January at Stanford, one of the big issues was, what about this national inventory? And we were really fortunate to have lots of local law librarians there from NoCal, the Northern California Association of Law Librarians. Lots of leadership, too, I should say, past, current, and former presidents, and future presidents. And there was a lot of interest. And some of the questions that we were most interested in included, what should we include in this inventory? What type of content should we collect? Formats, et cetera, price? What form should it take? How do we know copyright issues? What about the IP issues regarding briefs and violence to the court? Not produced by the court, but submitted to. How do we organize this effort? Is it done locally, statewide? Do we get AAOL to help? Legislative efforts and so on. And so we realize that for the inventory to really take hold, it would take a lot of effort across a lot of states with lots of volunteers. And right then and there, the group of NoCal folks, the good NoCal folks, decided to form an informal group to start working on this problem. Our mission was to create a prototype of the National Inventory focusing on California resources specifically. After a few phone calls and chats and emails, we started a Google group to start talking about this, and we decided to go with a very simple platform. No one wanted to master new skills or develop the greatest state-based product ever for this. We just wanted content to reign in this realm. And we figured after the inventory was created, we could leave it to technological innovation of someone else to kind of make it better. So we went with a Google spreadsheet. There were better solutions perhaps, but that's what we went with, because it's very easy to use, very easy to share, and very easy for us to manually edit, and a simple form can be generated for the spreadsheet. So if folks were not comfortable with the spreadsheet environment, they could just use a form and input data. It was very easy to track changes, and very helpful when you have lots of different people define the data. As with anything with a spreadsheet, you always have a real strong sense of concept like, oh, I really should have done it that way. We didn't. So we're learning. This is a learning process. So for example, we didn't cluster cities under their counties, which would have been such a logical thing to do. We can clean it up later, but we're like, ah, we had this dumb moment. We're like, oh, no, it's been so easy. We did include a column for permanent public access, but we can include that going forward. I think probably one of the most famous things we did include is a column for authenticated data. Chrome has talked about this, and many of you all have also talked about this, and that probably leads back to that first meeting when one of our volunteers, Susan, who's here, famously kind of explained nothing in California is authentic. We don't even need to document it. So no column for that. Nothing in California is authentic. I don't know if she was just referring to the law, but nothing in California is authentic. Anyway. But there were fields that were important and relevant, and we started filling those up. And the key ones for us, at least kind of what we're seeing so far are copyright assertion and language, disclaimers, official status, and price information, and that's somewhat tricky. We're still entering data, but we're seeing some interesting things, and we're sure some of these things will be mirrored in other states as we go along. I just want to add a tidbit. I co-teach Advanced Legal Research with Paul Lomio at the law library, and sometimes we'll bring in our frustration to the students about how much something costs, blah, blah, blah, whatever it's like to complain about these things. And this change will be likely going, ah, very interesting. Thanks for sharing. But we have started to actually use some, what we call law.gov type of assignments with our students. We're getting them to actually look. Each student will get 40 clusters. Each student will get a state, and they're looking at the administrative codes and the state codes, and all sorts of materials to see are there copyright assertions? Is it official? How easy can you find them both? And they're really surprised, and I think they're actually enjoying it. And we can talk about some of the fraud states at another time, but they're seeing some interesting things. Some of the things that we're seeing when we're doing this. So for California, what are the interesting bits? So they're about almost 540 municipalities and counties in the state of California, and nearly 80% of them have outsourced their municipal and county codes to four commercial vendors. Almost all of them seem to be free online from what we've seen so far. However, over 40% claim to be unofficial and have disclaimers. Almost 50% have copyright assertions. And I think those numbers are actually going to go up as we keep fine tuning the data, and this gets to lots of folks with different interpretations. Some things, if they don't say official, folks are uncomfortable saying, well, is it or isn't it? And so we have a lot of things with question marks or don't know, we'll come back to it. So I think that number could actually go up. Paper versions of many of these codes are also printed by the same publisher that produces it online. Not for free, my dad. And a question of bulk access came up and a good question. How easy it is to get bulk access? And the answer is nearly impossible. So we recently conducted a small sample of some of these municipalities trying to cover the different commercial vendors. And none of them had bulk access available. The best, I guess the second best for the loopy prize on this one was a PDI version, not bulk access. And that was for a few hundred dollars. So still, not the perfect world. And getting prize information on these things also is really tricky. Even though I work in a major law library, most university law libraries, most county law libraries, mainly have their local municipal codes available. They're not going to have all the state's codes. That's not from this realm. And so we are limited to the prize information individual volunteers might see. And calling each city in California is very time consuming. And not always on that helpful experience. So I have a few good examples to share with you and I'm not targeting anyone's hometown if it is your hometown. So Laguna Beach, looks like a nice place to go. Their municipal code is polished by Quality Code Polishing. And they produce about 90 of the state's municipal codes. The site's almost identical except for the city logo. And this is the disclaimer that's on all of theirs. This electronic version is provided for information only and should not be considered the official version of the code. So please consult the official printed version before signing provisions of this code. If inconsistencies exist, da-da-da, please look at the official legislation. Well, so I was like, okay, how do I go to the official version? And I called the nice city clerk's office at Laguna Beach. Very nice woman spoke to me there. And she's like, well, it's online. I said, well, I want to see the official version. How do I do that? Oh, gee. People haven't asked me about that in eons because it's online for a friend. So how much is it? And she said, I'll have to get back to you. And the woman was so nice and she got back to the next day. But it's about $125. And she said to me, I haven't sold one in. Who knows when? And for what it's worth, that was that example. Closer to home, San Jose. American legal publishing produces their municipal code. 43 of the state's codes are also produced by them. All of them also look just as with the other example, the same. And they all have a copy registration at the bottom of the site. And their disclaimer, similar to the other one, but I'll just share with you this code of ordinances and or other documents that appear on this site may not reflect the most current legislation adopted by the municipality. American legal publishing provides these documents for informational purpose only. We'll break. These documents should not be relied upon as the definitive authority for local legislation. Additionally, the formatting and pagination of the posted documents varies from the formatting of the official copy. The official printed copy of code of ordinances should be consulted prior to any action being taken. So if I did want to consult the official version, it would cost me about $300 plus $150 a year for updates. And one of our volunteers actually called American legal publishing and asked them about the copyright assertion on the bottom of the screen. And they didn't really have any answers. So we'll get back to you. We still haven't heard back from your colleagues. And this actually got a few volunteers talking because we all are a lot of librarians. When do you ever see disclaimers like this in books? And certainly printed materials and primary materials have mistakes in them all the time. And any librarian here has gotten the notices of replacement pages, of self-adhesive correction sheets, his slap in the book. But something about the web keeps prompting these disclaimers like you cannot rely on the material again and again. You're going to forgive me. I'm going to give you a few more quick examples since they're good. The Office of Attorney General went to their site to look for the opinions. And they have a really interesting one, this disclaimer. Disclaimer of duty to continue provision of the data. Due to the dynamic nature of the internet, resources that are freely and publicly available one day may require a fee or restrict access the next. And the location of items may change as menus, home pages, and files are reorganized by the internet. User agrees that the use of the Attorney General's home page is at the user's sole risk. And they cannot guarantee that it will be error-free. So I guess if you wanted to be error-free, and it's due to, you like to say, the dynamic nature of print, if you want to buy it, it's about $100. And we've mentioned that California Supreme Court and their contract and the appellate decisions, which is contracted with Plexus. But I want to share kind of a bit of the language from the over 2,500 word license agreement that you have to get through to read the material. It's saying that there is no charge, no copyright on the opinion text, but the text and the page is limited to personal use and see the lengthy publisher's limitations on use. The official reports summaries and head notes are subject to copyright are not included in this site. The official reports page, and this is the best part, is primarily intended to provide effective public access to all California's presidential appellate decisions. It is not intended to function as an alternative to commercial computer-based services and products for comprehensive legal research, such as licensees who produce this service. And this section, when we talked about this with our students, one of our lawsuits came up to us after class and said, would it be malpractice to use this site? And that's an excellent question. One good copyright example I want to share with you, the California Civil Jury Instructions. This is also similar with the criminal jury instructions produced by the Judicial Council in California. This one is freely available in official form on their website, but it has some interesting copyright language. So it says on the online version and in the paper. It's identical. Copyright 2010 by the Judicial Council of California all rights reserved. No copyright is claimed by the Judicial Council to the Table of Contents, Table of Statutes, Table of Cases, Index, or Table of Related Instructions. And below that, 2010, Matthew Bender and Company, a member of the Lexis nexus group, no copyright is claimed to the text of the jury instructions and verdict forms, directions for use, sources of authority, or other advisory committee commentary, user's guide, life expectancy tables, which were shrinking for us as we were reading this, were a disposition table. And the paper version is identical. What's interesting is even though Matthew Bender is the official kind of contract for this, Westlaw, who produces an unofficial version of this, has the same copyright language just substituted in Westlaw for Matthew Bender. And this was a difficult one for us in our spreadsheet for like checkbox, like when we put down for this. And a recent example just came up, a patron came by the library and was using some Public Utility Commission materials. And they are all on the web, but this is an interesting once we hadn't even thought about it. I was mentioning this to Susan just now. You have page numbers on any of the materials. This patron is a local attorney who wants to cite it in briefs. The online version is useless to her. She said there are no paragraph numbers, so it's really difficult and she had to find a paper version of the library, which is what brought her to our library. And those are some of the challenges that we're facing is kind of getting consistency and definitions, getting and keeping volunteers. We're lucky to have over 20, but it's keeping them going. So it's an important piece. And the price information we're dealing with is a moving target. Every library and every librarian here knows that price relationships with vendors vary. So the price I might have might be different than the price, you know, Susan might have and from a county library and so on. So we're just kind of taking a stab at what price information we have. We're going to put in there, but it's not perfect and we know that. And I think looking ahead, the really great thing is the AAL, the American Association of Library is behind this process. And as of this moment, besides the California inventory, which is alive and well, there is, I think there are seven working groups right now that are currently starting on their projects and they're kind of random individuals who are actually doing little bits and pieces in their states. And so I think there's some good momentum on it and hopefully we can kind of generate some more interest. Right. So I'll sort of follow up with some of the stuff that Eric was covering up. Just some additional things about the stuff in California as well as in the U.S. is that a lot of times that the state government will print out things, but they don't really do the full job of it. And so, for example, we talked a bit about the Oregon Code and the headings and things like that in Oregon now, sort of state government was clicking copyright on them. If you go to the legislative council and you go to the California Code, you don't even have the headings. They actually strip those out. So one way to keep people from copying those is just not to put them up for free. And I'm surprised that this is happening in California. You just have to code up for a number of years, but it's the way it is right now. And you can't, you know, if you look through different administrative agencies sometimes, they might have a section of codes that relates to their agency. So sometimes you can find those headings. I know Rob, who does the Oregon Law Sites, but we have this for California as well. But it's going to be quite a bit of work, and they just put it up. So that's, you know, sort of one thing to note. The other thing is that the national inventory is sort of going through and getting done. A lot of the stuff that's out there on the web right now is not on Lexus or West. So Lexus and West have a lot of things out there, certainly on the case law and the statutes and the codes on the state level and federal level. But they're not down to all the cities. I mean, this is sort of a hodgepodge of different sort of regulations and regulations and code sections. And so I think a large part, you know, if you're an average person, you know, and you're just looking at laundry every day of life, you certainly get some state things you need to focus on to make sure you're on a driver's license, like it's like that. But other items like, you know, landlord tenants or, you know, like something's rent-controlled or not rent-controlled, you know, everyday life types of things. It's often at the city level, even, you know, small things like, you know, how can I fight my parking ticket or something like that. So there's a lot of stuff that I think that impacts everyday people, that's at the city level, which has not been available on West and West. Just know that every day people tend to go there. The West and West is anyways, where I think the city governments and the county governments have done a great job in getting this stuff up. And writing contracts that require this stuff to be online for free. So that's one, you know, that's one sort of core thing, because if you look at the internet, the actual amount of content, legal content that's out there, is incredibly high. As I sort of look through, you know, sort of dealing with the different state governments, I think one of the big things that I, you know, I think that we want to work on is not just sort of get things involved so that we can download it or get it everywhere for download, which is fine. I think it's also to help the state governments or the county and city governments publish this stuff themselves. So while I think it's good that we find what's out there and what's missing, a secondary part of this, sort of finding the best practices, finding who's doing a good job of it, and get these guys in communication with each other so they can actually use some of the tools and share the tools across different governments. And ideally, you know, at some point, especially with some of the tech people that Carl's put together, Tom Bruce and some of the guys at Cornell and some of these other places, get some open source publishing tools and some open source, or sort of open citation systems, which are consistent across many different sort of levels of government. And I realize, you know, this might take a long, long time to do, but we do have a lot of good tech people that are very interested in this right now, and they've shown a good ability to really, you know, program all the very, very appropriate law of getting things out for free, and they'll be more than happy to provide these tools and stuff to the government, even help train them, even help set them up with different types of servers and things. So, you know, I think there's lots of work finding out what's there and what's not there, but also going through there and then trying to get these different government agencies sort of connected with each other to use the best practices. The other thing I wanted to quickly mention was just sort of the California case law just sort of as an example, mainly because I went through the contract that Lexus had with the state of California and just given for an RFP, just sort of went through a few items here. The first thing, you know, if you look at the California case law online, the stuff that's provided by Lexus sort of the archive back to just KL1 or just California police they do have to provide it online for free, so that was part of the contract and that part was there. That's basically all the sense. It doesn't say you have to do anything else or even provide it for free. They could put more licensing restrictions or whatever else they want to in front of it. The goal I think of the California court system was at least allow the public to be able to read a case if they wanted to read a case. But beyond that, there's not a lot there. No internal occasions there or there. Head notes. So this contract with Lexus as well as the one just, I guess the RFP closed a couple weeks ago, but we'll see if Lexus gets it again, but it might be West or maybe FastCase or Wolf's Clerk. Depending who gets it, but the head notes are required to be written as part of the contract. The company like Lexus that writes the head notes, they can keep copyrighting those head notes in some of the other classification schemes. But they have to give a license back to the state of California so the state of California can use it in future editions of their code. So basically if Lexus doesn't win this next roundabout of the contract, the next publisher of the official version of the California code can in fact publish out the head notes that were written by Lexus by way of the California government. But that said, those head notes and those classification schemes are not really about the free site on Lexus Nexus or Lexus Dash and Nexus depending on how you have your cookie set.com. So this is just one sort of item and I think it would not be too hard for the California government to require ownership of those head notes and things like that. I believe since they're basically required in any way, they're self afraid and the only real control over them from Lexus' standpoint, I guess, is they don't help everyone but they somehow keep them off of the free system while they're running the free site themselves. So that might be one thing to think of. The other item I think from a Lexus standpoint is they don't really get money from becoming official publishers. What they really get is a large market benefit. They get the subscriber list of previous people that subscribed to the official code in terms of CD or what publications or if they want to sell them they move them out of the online system. So in that subscriber list it has to be provided by the previous entity that was actually producing the official version. So there's some real market value in there in terms of getting a subscriber list and you're the official publisher. And there's really something to be said when you're the official publisher of the code. And I think there's probably two companies that have very strong brands here. I think West up, I think Thompson Reuters West has a very strong brand in terms of what they do. And I think Lexus and Exus does. But someone let's say like Fast Case came and got a hold of California cases. They would give them a very strong brand proposition to be able to say that it's an official one. So that's one huge item. And I'm pretty sure that's why Lexus probably wants to really get this contract. I have an idea of what's going on with West but I'm allowed to say it. I was there at the time on this table. For a very brief period of time. So, I mean, there's some real benefits on that. And then, you know, as far as the cases themselves go just in terms of California, the cases right now basically since the CalSec are up online for free. So I don't know if they're legal net has or if they're some other folks. I'm sure Google's going to have them up relatively soon as well. So those are out and about. So for California, I think it's pretty much out there. And that's with internal page numbers and everything else. But you still would like to go back and sort of get these previous cases. So maybe a clinic or something might be interesting. A test case for it. Maybe not that certainly a possibility. But I would like to see some sort of litigation or some sort of something to sort of clarify some of these legal issues. So that was the main item on the point out on the California cases. It is up for review right now. Obviously, I don't know who's going to get it. But it's something where, you know, sort of the corpus sort of passes from entity to entity. It's just that Lexus made a choice not to put it all on larger free. It doesn't mean that it's a fast case or multiple scluers got it. That they couldn't actually put it on as well as they had it on somethings like that. So I wanted to add two points on the California inventory. For the state court system, it's really quite interesting because it's part of the click through license agreement to access the full court opinions of California. You click through an agreement that says this is for personal use only and it explicitly excludes public and non-profit uses from the use of those materials. As far as the attorney general opinions, I actually about six months ago sent a note to the attorney general's office saying, I would like to put all the attorney general opinions online and make them available. I received a note back from the attorney general's office saying, well, you will need to send us a proposal to get our permission. At that point, took all the attorney general opinions that were visible on the internet and made a copy of those and sent the note back saying, you know, guess what? I got a lot of them and they're available for $67 on Lulu, which is less than $2,500 official attorney general opinions. And the case was referred to a deputy attorney general. They've conducted a legal review and for several months now we've been asking them to make a decision on whether we're able to actually get the rest of the attorney general opinions and make them available to the public for free. And so we're still waiting. We have not sued or threatened to sue or do any legal actions. The attorney general is not only in California, he's an elected official and so we're hoping that perhaps that part of his personality will make him want to make the information available. So I want to thank Erika for starting off this national legal inventory. You have postcards in front of you, one for each of the different states. We also made some very nice playing cards. We got the move which you can give out to your various volunteers. I also made another copy to give to Roberta Schaefer to donate to the Law Library of Congress so that we have a copy of that in perpetuity.