Ravel, Harvard, and Indigestion for Lexis and Westlaw
October 31, 2015
If you are a lucky online maven with free Lexis and Westlaw access, you do not want to waste your time reading “Harvard Law School Launches “Free the Law” Project with Ravel Law To Digitize US Case Law, Provide Free Access.”
But if you pay hard cash to run queries on certain court documents, you may want to pay attention to the Ravel-Harvard plan to provide access to US case law.
Ravel wants to catch the attention of the big guns at Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters. I assume the executives at these companies are on top of the Ravel plan to unravel their money machines.
According to the Harvard write up:
Harvard Law School’s collection comprises 40,000 books containing approximately forty million pages of court decisions, including original materials from cases that predate the U.S. Constitution. It is the most comprehensive and authoritative database of American law and cases available anywhere except for the Library of Congress, containing binding judicial decisions from the federal government and each of the fifty states, from the founding of each respective jurisdiction. The Harvard Law School Library—the largest academic law library in the world—has been collecting these decisions over the past two hundred years.
Where there is legal information and the two leading for fee legal online services, my hunch is that there will be some legal eagles taking flight.
According to Techdirt:
Harvard “owns” the resulting data (assuming what’s ownable), and while there are some initial restrictions that Ravel can put on the corpus of data, that goes away entirely after eight years, and can end earlier if Ravel “does not meet its obligations.” Beyond that, Harvard is making everything available to non-profits and researchers anyway. Ravel is apparently looking to make some money by providing advanced tools for sifting through the database, even if the content itself will be freely available.
What will the professional publishing outfits do to preserve their market? I can think of several actions. Sure, litigation is one route. But taking Harvard to court might generate some bad vibes. Perhaps Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters will finally bite the bullet, merge, and then buy out Ravel? We have Walgreen Boots, why not LexisWestlaw? Is that a scary Halloween thought? Let the Department of Justice unravel that deal. Don’t lawyers enjoy that sort of challenge.
Stephen E Arnold, October 31, 2015
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