Cross Posted to Law-Lib and Net-Lawyers
It is encouraging to see that Tim Holthoff and the Arkansas judiciary (as
described in the included message below) are:
ONE, taking the responsibility of setting up and maintaining the court's own
Web pages (or perhaps I misread the relationship between the Court and
ualr.edu).
TWO, making the files available on FTP in the best available and original
format, in this case Word Perfect.
Actually, of these two, the second, a court FTP server, is not only more
significant, but easier to maintain, less expensive to operate and has the
potential to provide more accurate and complete information.
This approach (especially using FTP), in my view, is a far more appropriate way
and least-cost way for a court to conducts its core business than sloughing off
the responsibility on law schools, some of which do not make the original files
available via FTP (one exception is Texas) and which law schools seem have no
concern about version control. [hopefully, Tim Holthoff is helping the court
set up the FTP site, and not taking over the court's responsibility.]
Thus, one question is whether opinions that are corrected or amended will be
appropriately identified so that one can examine an FTP directory and determine
whether a file has been modified.
Some courts will correct files and continue to use the original issuance date
as the date for the file. One cannot rely upon file sizes either to determine
whether the file was changed. For example, in the last several months, the
Eighth Circuit modified four opinions, but the file sizes remained the same,
the file name remained the same, and the file date remained the same. Although
we were notified of this anomaly by the Circuit staff, this is not obvious to
someone not tracking the situation closely.
What works best is a file naming convention that identifies modified files, and
a description of the naming convention in a read.me file on the FTP server. In
addition, a list of the files and modifications could be maintained is a
separate file, as does the Eleventh Circuit (i.e, and employee of the Eleventh
Circuit clerk's office) on its FTP site. Finally, the amending or correcting
date needs to be included in the file text itself.
Last, set permissions so the files cannot be modified.
I note that assurance of authoritativeness of an opinion (and version of an
opinion) can only come material initially deriving from the clerk's office.
One final copy about the law school set-ups ... egads, some of the law schools
are asserting copyrights on the HTML versions a la West and at the same time
not making the original files available or easily available (like GPO-ACCESS),
and not even making the RTF versions {which have a different file date from the
original file obtained from the court) available on an FTP server. Since some
of the courts do not maintain older files on their BBS, one will in future
years have to go to these law school copyrighted versions of HTML files for
archives -- and of course they may then ask for a "contribution" to pay for
their efforts in substracting value (i.e. information) from files by converting
the original. Sound familiar?
Here, for example, is the copyright notice of Emory Law School, which
incidentally asked for and obtained free access to the US Circuit Court BBS
systems (we pay $.75 a minute). Emory does not make the original versions
available ... to get the rtf version of the original version, one must first
find and then open up the HTML version, and to to the end and get the RTF
version which is not on an FTP site. There is no indication whether one is
looking at the original or amended version:
*******************************
Emory Notice
*******************************
<dt><b>Copyright ©1994, 1995 Emory University School of Law,
Information Technology Services</b>
<p>
<dd>Copyright in the underlying marked up HTML files which implement the
hypertext features of these World Wide Web tables of links to federal
court decisions and tables of court decisions is held by Emory University
School of Law, ITS. Distribution of this version on the Internet, does
not constitute consent to any use of the underlying hypertext markup for
commercial redistribution either via the Internet or using some other
form of hypertext distribution.<p>
<dd>Copyright in the underlying marked up text files which implement the
footnote features of the original WordPerfect files of court decisions is
held by Emory School of Law, ITS. Distribution of this version on the Internet,
does not consitute consent to any use of the underlying footnote markup for
commercial redistribution either via the Internet or using some other form
of distribution.<p>
<dd>Copyright in the underlying marked up RTF/ASCII document files which
implement
the features of the original WordPerfect/ASCII files of court decisions is held
by Emory University School of Law, ITS. Emory Law School grants free,
unrestricted use of these versions.<P>
****************************
End of Emory Notice
****************************
<---- Begin Included Message ---->
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996 08:48:00 -0500
From: "Tim Holthoff, Law Student and Librarian" <TNHOLTHOFF@ualr.edu>
Reply-To: teknoids@listserv.law.cornell.edu
Sender: teknoids@listserv.law.cornell.edu
Subject: Need help! Problem w/ftp & web browser
To: owner-teknoids@listserv.law.cornell.edu
I'm working on the web pages for the Arkansas judiciary.
I want to make the Ark. Supreme Court & Court of Appeals opinions
available in WP5.1 (the format in which the opinions are produced).
While experimenting, I put the opinion in a directory accessible
through anonymous ftp. I found that I could transfer the file
using an ftp client. However, when I tried to get the file
using an ftp:// URL on the web page, in Netscape there was no
file transfer, and in Lynx the file transferred as an ASCII file.
The computer people maintaining the web server suggested that just
make the files available in ASCII, but because the legal publishers
will eventually be unable to dial-in to the Court's machine
that is currently used to disseminate the opinions, it is
imperative that I get this working.
Right now I don't have any more info on the server software, but
it is running on an IBM machine under AIX.
Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions.
Tim Holthoff
Assistant Librarian
Arkansas Supreme Court Library
(501)682-2147
tnholthoff@ualr.edu
<---- End Included Message ---->
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Alan D. Sugarman Federal Appeals on Disc tm CD-ROM ::
President Opinions of US Courts of Appeals ::
1993 to Date - All Circuits ::
HyperLaw, Inc. ® ::
P.O. Box 1176 DO NOT SHORT CIRCUIT YOUR CLIENTS ::
New York, NY 10023 ::
sugarman@hyperlaw.com 212-787-2812 212-496-4138(fax) ::
::
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