Category: Technology

Law.Gov: America’s Operating System, Open Source – O’Reilly Radar

An amazing announcement about law.gov, a tool that could revolutionize access to legal documents in America:

We envision Law.Gov as a distributed, open source, authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.

From the public.resource.org site:

Law.Gov is an effort to create a report documenting exactly what it would take to create a distributed registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.

Transparency in law is at the foundation of why a democracy works.  That these documents are still largely locked inside private databases and books, despite being absent of all copyright protection, in this age of easy storage and access is surprising. Perhaps all that was needed was an initiative like this one.

Noting all of the prominent IP academics on the “Co-Conveners” list gives me hope that there will be easy access for citation managers (the one technical requirement thing on my wish list).