Free the Law: all U.S. case law online
No response.<p>---<p>To: Erik Eckholm &lt;eckholm@nytimes.com&gt;<p>From: Aaron Greenspan<p>Date: October 30, 2015 at 1:31 PM<p>Subject: Concerns over Ravel&#x2F;HLS Deal<p>Mr. Eckholm,<p>We just briefly spoke on the phone about your article (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;29&#x2F;us&#x2F;harvard-law-library-sacrifices-a-trove-for-the-sake-of-a-free-database.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;29&#x2F;us&#x2F;harvard-law-library-sac...</a>). I am a Harvard College ’04-’05 alum, one of Professor Zittrain’s former students (I actually had to fight the administration to be permitted entry into his Law School course in 2001), and one of the first people Ravel tried to hire, because I am a programmer and I run a legal database called PlainSite (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plainsite.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plainsite.org</a>), which competes with them and receives about 16,000 unique hits daily worldwide. I was also a CodeX Fellow at Stanford Law School in 2012-2013, which is a program at Stanford that Daniel Lewis and Nik Reed are now also affiliated with. I tell you all of this only to point out that I am generally quite familiar with the principles, technologies and individuals involved here.<p>I’ve now corresponded with Jonathan Zittrain and Adam Ziegler at HLS, the latter by phone earlier today. I have brought to their attention a number of concerns, none of which have been resolved in my mind. They are as follows:<p>1. Harvard University is a Massachusetts not-for-profit organization. Its investment in Ravel, a for-profit corporation, via its XFund venture capital arm, and its subsequent contract with Ravel to earn &quot;proceeds&quot; (HLS’s term) from that relationship, involves profit. The University could in theory lose its tax-exempt status over this deal. This is not the same as the Harvard Management Corporation investing in for-profit corporations to further the University’s mission by earning capital gains and&#x2F;or dividends—this is an exchange of cash for assets that Harvard claims it owns (even though case materials are public domain) and a contractual promise to monetize those assets through a for-profit company on an ongoing basis.<p>2. Worse yet, the deal involves profit from the withholding of public access to legal data, which is the precise ill that this relationship is nominally supposed to and claims to cure. In reality, it only exacerbates it by legitimizing, with all of Harvard’s imprimatur, the monopolistic legal information model that has dominated the nation’s judiciary for the past century and a half.<p>3. Professor Zittrain wrote an entire book on the dangers of internet lock-in and monopolies, yet his actions here are helping to create exactly the kind of monopoly he has become well known for warning about. According to Adam Ziegler’s recent post on the HLS Library blog (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;etseq.law.harvard.edu" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;etseq.law.harvard.edu</a>), there are to be &quot;bulk access limitations&quot; and &quot;contractual prohibitions on redistribution.&quot; This is inconsistent with precedent concerning openness to court records and First Amendment law. That aside, what will these restrictions look like exactly? We don’t know, because…<p>4. ...Adam Ziegler told me that the contract with Ravel is not available for public examination and he did not know when it would be (if ever). He did read me a portion of the contract over the phone, which cited &quot;non-commercial developers,&quot; and challenged me to come up with better wording. That’s easy. I don’t know what a &quot;non-commercial developer&quot; is, but I do know what a &quot;non-profit organization&quot; is. As an individual, I am a software developer who is the CEO of a for-profit corporation in a joint venture with a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization which together maintain PlainSite. Does that make me a &quot;non-commercial developer?&quot; Although Mr. Ziegler insisted that the contract was not subject to interpretation because it is simply clear enough already, I strongly disagree, as I expect any lawyer would. All contracts are subject to interpretation. The contract needs to be posted.<p>5. One of Ravel’s investors is Cooley LLP, a law firm in the Bay Area. Based on what Daniel and Nik have told me in the past, Cooley has early access to Ravel’s software. Essentially this means that Harvard Law School is giving one particular law firm an advantage, which I imagine must violate a number of its own policies, and seems wrong on the surface.<p>6. Professor Zittrain claims it would have taken 8 years to raise the money that Ravel is providing for this effort. This is extremely difficult to believe. Although Mr. Ziegler refused to disclose how much money is actually involved, we can safely assume it is in the $5 million range given that Ravel has only raised just under $10 million and has had employees to pay for several years. Recently, a single donor gave Harvard University’s engineering school $400 million, as your own newspaper reported (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;04&#x2F;education&#x2F;john-paulson-gives-400-million-to-harvard-for-engineering-school.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;04&#x2F;education&#x2F;john-paulson-giv...</a>). Harvard is also in the middle of a $6 billion-and-counting capital campaign, as reported by The Crimson (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thecrimson.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2015&#x2F;9&#x2F;18&#x2F;capital-campaign-6-bil&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thecrimson.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2015&#x2F;9&#x2F;18&#x2F;capital-campaign...</a>). Are we really to believe that the number one law school in the country (by some measures, anyway) could not scrape together the cash to buy its own scanners, or that it does not have scanners already? Are high speed scanners even that expensive? Here’s one on eBay for $1,450:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebay.com&#x2F;itm&#x2F;KODAK-i610-PASS-THROUGH-HIGH-SPEED-DUPLEX-80-PPM-B-W-Scanner-&#x2F;271985315247?hash=item3f53968daf:g:XjQAAOSwBahU8oC4" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebay.com&#x2F;itm&#x2F;KODAK-i610-PASS-THROUGH-HIGH-SPEED-D...</a><p>7. Mr. Ziegler could not answer my question as to why a consortium of non-profits was not consulted ahead of time. I know many that would have been eager to assist, likely including the Internet Archive in San Francisco, which already has several scanners.<p>8. Though I do not speak for them, I did notice that Harvard and Ravel seem to have nearly appropriated the name &quot;Free Law Project,&quot; which is actually a project and non-profit organization at Berkeley that took over from work at Princeton. See <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freelawproject.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freelawproject.org</a> and <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.courtlistener.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.courtlistener.com</a>.<p>9. The Harvard Gazette has falsely reported, &quot;The &#x27;Free the Law’ initiative will provide open, wide-ranging access to American case law for the first time in U.S. history.&quot; (See <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.harvard.edu&#x2F;gazette&#x2F;story&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;free-the-law-will-provide-open-access-to-all&#x2F;." rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.harvard.edu&#x2F;gazette&#x2F;story&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;free-the-law-w...</a>) I have been in regular contact with Jonathan Zittrain, Harry Lewis (an XFund Advisor who was Dean during my freshman year) and others at HLS about PlainSite since I brought the idea to them in 2011 almost immediately as soon as I started working on it. Additionally, CourtListener (from the group at Berkeley) has also been in operation for years, offering open, wide-ranging access to American case law. There’s also Google Scholar, which is free and certainly more wide-ranging than Ravel.<p>10. Ravel is, to the best of my knowledge, unprofitable. It remains unclear why Harvard would place its bets on an unprofitable startup, rather than solicit donations for a project—as it is so adept at doing—in order to ensure maximum sustainability.<p>Mr. Ziegler attempted to dismiss the above concerns on the grounds that we still both agree in the greater goal of open access to law. I certainly have done all that I can to promote open access to legal information, including developing prototypes for digital legal data standards and suing the courts themselves (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plainsite.org&#x2F;dockets&#x2F;29himg3wm&#x2F;california-northern-district-court&#x2F;think-computer-foundation-et-al-v-administrative-office-of-the-united-states-courts-et-al&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plainsite.org&#x2F;dockets&#x2F;29himg3wm&#x2F;california-northe...</a>). But if we both agree on this greater goal, then why has HLS been almost completely unresponsive to requests for cooperative assistance for the past four years, while this deal was being negotiated in secret?<p>To be clear, Harvard is not the only institution that has made highly questionable and insincere claims about its legal transparency efforts. Stanford CodeX claims to support open access to the law, yet it is now directly sponsored by Thomson Reuters, the parent company of West Publishing, and its &quot;innovation contests&quot; involve pledges not to redistribute case materials. But I would expect the Times to be able to distinguish between academic puffery and genuine efforts to improve the state of our incredibly broken legal system.<p>Aaron<p>PlainSite | <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plainsite.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plainsite.org</a>