James Grimmelmann has an interesting new essay, “Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law,” on the challenges of ensuring that the public has effective knowledge of the laws. This might sound like an easy problem, but Grimmelmann combines history and explanation to show why it can be difficult. The law – which includes both legislators’ statutes and judges’ decisions – is large, complex, and ever-changing.
Suppose I gave you a big stack of paper containing all of the laws ever passed by Congress (and signed by the President). This wouldn’t be very useful, if what you wanted was to know whether some action you were contemplating would violate the law. How would you find the laws bearing on that action? And if you did find such a law, how would you determine whether it had been repealed or amended later, or how courts had interpreted it?
Making the law accessible in practice, and not just in theory, requires a lot of work. You need reliable summaries, topic-based indices, reverse-citation indices (to help you find later documents that might affect the meaning of earlier ones), and so on. In the old days of paper media, all of this had to be printed and distributed in large books, and updated editions had to be published regularly. How to make this happen was an interesting public policy problem.
The traditional answer has been copyright. Generally, the laws themselves (statutes and court opinions) are not copyrightable, but extra-value content such as summaries and indices can be copyrighted. The usual theory of copyright applies: give the creators of extra-value content some exclusive rights, and the profit motive will ensure that good content is created.
This has some similarity to our Princeton model for government transparency, which urges government to publish information in simple open formats, and leave it to private parties to organize and present the information to the public. Here government was creating the basic information (statutes and court opinions) and private parties were adding value. It wasn’t exactly our model, as government was not taking care to publish information in the form that best facilitated private re-use, but it was at least evidence for our assertion that, given data, private parties will step in and add value.
All of this changed with the advent of computers and the Internet, which made many of the previously difficult steps cheaper and easier. For example, it’s much easier to keep a website up to date than to deliver updates to the owners of paper books. Computers can easily construct citation indices, and a search engine provides much of the value of a printed index. Access to the laws can be cheaper and easier now.
What does this mean for public policy? First, we can expect more competition to deliver legal information to the public, thanks to the reduced barriers to entry. Second, as competition drives down prices we’ll see fewer entities that are solely in the business of providing access to laws; instead we’ll see more non-profits, along with businesses providing free access. More competition and lower prices will mean better and more effective access to the law for citizens. Third, copyright will still play a role by supporting the steps that remain costly, such as the writing of summaries.
Finally, it will matter more than ever exactly how government provides access to the raw information. If, as sometimes happens now, government provides the raw information in an awkward or difficult-to-use form, private actors must invest in converting it into a more usable form. These investments might not have mattered much in the past when the rest of the process was already expensive; but in the Internet age they can make a big difference. Given access to the right information in the right format, one person can produce a useful mashup or visualization tool with a few weeks of spare-time work. Government, by getting the details of data publication right, can enable a flood of private innovation, not to mention a better public debate.