Recap: A Firefox Plugin That Liberates Paywalled Court Records

https://www.recapthelaw.org/

by dc2k08 • 17 years ago

27 10 17 years ago

What a fantastic idea - liberating documents one by one, whilst making life easier (and cheaper) for people looking for that data!

I applaud the people behind this.

eli2• 17 years ago

Oh, now that's clever. I bet Carl Malamud wishes he thought of that.

igurari2• 17 years ago

It's clever, but we'll have to wait and see how much it actually adds to the collection of documents freely available. The bulk of the Recap repository was seeded with documents Malamud collected. Of course, Recap appears to be a nice way to actually interact with that collection.

eli2• 17 years ago

I don't think you should discount how much of a difference this makes. It slides right in to users' existing workflow requiring far less effort on their part.

anthonymc2• 17 years ago

I showed this to a lawyer friend of mine who also has a background in technology. While he thought it was a nice tool for preliminary or casual research, he said that ultimately he will still need to go and purchase the documents so that he is absolutely certain they are the originals since there doesn't seem to be a publicly available way to verify them.

A possible solution to this would be a published hash value from the original source.

potatolicious• 17 years ago

"A possible solution to this would be a published hash value from the original source."

If you get the government to agree to that, I think it would be trivial to get them to agree to release the documents themselves...

ramchip• 17 years ago

Not necessarily, since the problem is mostly bandwidth and distribution.

mikeytown2• 17 years ago

What about sites like http://openjurist.org/ ? Disclaimer: I've currently working on improving this site

Recap: A Firefox Plugin That Liberates Paywalled Court Records

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