Category Archives: Noteworthy Events

Copyright Lawsuit Against Thomson Reuters, Lexis Nexis Over Legal Briefs Dismissed

According to a release by Thomson Reuters, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff dismissed an action brought by lawyers arguing that Thomson Reuters and Lexis Nexis violated copyright by copying legal briefs and selling access to those documents on their research platforms (White v. West Publishing Corp., S.D.N.Y., No. 12-1340). No details of the decision are available yet, as the judge dismissed the action in a brief ruling on Friday while indicating his reasoning would be laid out in a subsequent opinion.

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Although the legal publishing industry (in which I work) is likely happy with the dismissal because it allows them to continue to sell access to databases of legal briefs, the part of me that studied intellectual property law was pleased to see the legal industry face the same problems other industries must deal with from a broken copyright system. I am also annoyed that the legal industry may craft rules that allow itself to avoid those problems (i.e., legal briefs are ok to copy because they are super special legal things) I suspect the judge will come up with some reasoning why legal briefs are in fact special or unique (somehow making them not subject to normal copyright rules) simply because they were filed as part of a court’s public record. If this is the reasoning, I suspect such a view will open a can of worms with related copyright issues. For example, when copyrighted material is attached as an appendix to a legal brief or court opinion (as the U.S. Supreme Court did in the copyright case Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539 (1985) in which the court published the very excerpts from Gerald Ford’s memoirs that were at the center of that lawsuit) does it lose its copyright protection? Does the court filings about a copyrighted work, destroy the protection of that very work just because it was part of a legal brief. At this point, I do not see any reasoning that can differentiate between the copyrighted work of an attorney from other copyrighted works that become part of a court’s records.

One additional note, a rather ridiculous argument in today’s very press release by Thomson Reuters on the dismissal shows their ignorance of copyright law:

Westlaw and Lexis countered that they were entitled to use the documents under the doctrine of fair use, according to court filings. They noted that the documents were generally available to the public via the Pacer filing system.

In light of the current debate highlighting how PACER data is generally not made available to the public this is an ill-timed argument to cite. Further what does general public availability have to do with copyright? Think of how quickly piracy lawsuits would be thrown out, if the accused copyright violator only had to demonstrate how available a work was?

I am eager to see how the judge arrived at his decision to dismiss the lawsuit. Perhaps the sequel to this lawsuit will be brought by laws students against law school reviews and journals (I worked for a journal in law school and I had a copyright professor that insisted any work I did for the journal was “obviously” a work-for-hire. However, most work for hire involves a creator being paid, not the other way around)

Stay tuned!

LexisNexis to Shut Down Matthew Bender Office, Layoff 220 Employees

LexisNexis recently announced it will close the Albany office of Matthew Bender and eliminate approximately 220 jobs. According to news reports, the notice LexisNexis filed on Tuesday with New York’s Department of Labor indicated that the office will be closed by the end of 2014 and layoffs are expected to begin in mid-April. LexisNexis has also apparently indicated that it will offer relocation to offices in New York City and Dayton, Ohio to select employees. Matthew Bender & Company, which was acquired by LexisNexis in 1887, was founded in Albany in 1887 and just celebrated its 125th year in 2012.

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Aaron Swartz, Open Information Activist, Commits Suicide

I learned of the suicide of Aaron Swartz via Chris Hayes on MSNBC, who described him as having a brilliant mind and righteous heart. The 26-year-old Swartz suffered from depression and was facing up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for downloading articles from the online database of scholarly work JSTOR (charged with 13 felony counts, including wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer). Swartz was focused on JSTOR because he was offended it charged large fees for access to articles but did not compensate the authors, denying free access to the scholarship produced by U.S. colleges and universities. In his brief life, however, Swartz made an amazing impact on the world, including a direct impact on some of the issues I discuss here on this blog.

Among his accomplishments, he:

Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, original photo by Sage Ross

Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, original photo by Sage Ross

Friends and family have issued a statement and created a memorial page.

Conference on Internet Privacy, Social Networks and Data Aggregation (Mar. 23, 2012)

I recently attended the Conference on Internet Privacy, Social Networks, and Data Aggregation which was held at my old law school, Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Chicago-Kent College of Law. The conference was hosted by the Center for Information, Society, and Policy on Friday, March 23, 2012. There were a number of interesting speakers some of which I have listed below (see the complete conference agenda) with some of my thoughts on the respective issues they covered.

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Data Science Chicago Meetup (Mar. 22, 2012)

Today, I attended presentation about government data hosted by Data Science Chicago, a Chicago-based meetup group. The presentation was interesting both because of the personal background of the speaker, Brett Goldstein, as well as the number of interesting projects that were discussed that are using open government data. The speaker was the former IT director for OpenTable before joining the Chicago police department.

During his presentation he explained how his role as a police officer led to founding the Chicago Police Department’s Predictive Analytics Group, an effort to use patterns in incident-level crime data to predict future incidents of crime. According to Mr. Goldstein, the group’s predictions were able to focus police patrols on 1-2% of the city (down to the census block level) in which murders or other violent crimes were likely to occur.

Mr. Goldstein is now the City of Chicago’s Chief Data Officer and, at the event, he talked about the city’s effort to make government data open to the public and a number of projects using that data. According to Mr. Goldstein, the city’s data portal has already released the incident-level crime data going back 10 years — the biggest such collection of open data in the world. His more recent efforts have focused on using MongoDB for spatially-focused time series data and the release of the city’s 311 data. The speaker also touched on a number of related topics, including the use of regression analysis, the treatment effect, the need for more useful geographical boundaries other than census blocks, and advice for aspiring data scientists on the skills needed to be effective.

Overall, an interesting presentation and it made me want to take a closer look at the data sets available through these government portals. While I was already familiar with data.gov for federal level data, I was surprised to find so much data available at my city, county, and state level.