What does open access look like for the law? Through free access to primary legal sources, the Free Law Project provides an important service to advocates, journalists, researchers, and the public. Joining with an international movement for Free Access to Law, the US-based organization helps people know their rights in an increasingly uncertain and rapidly changing legal era.

The Free Law Project is an umbrella organization for a variety of projects, including Court Listener for millions of pieces of legal data, the RECAP project (begun by Aaron Swartz in 2009) to freely open the PACER archive of legal data, a complete repository of Supreme Court Data, a repository of judicial opinions and seals, and a Free Law Reporters Database. The project’s call for greater transparency in the law has been covered in a variety of news outlets, and their work continues to grow in scope and importance.

The Free Law Project is accepting volunteers, legal and otherwise, for help with code, transcription, and more at their website. Project founder Mike Lissner graciously answered these questions via email.

Why is it important for citizens to gain access to free legal documents? How does your work run parallel with the open access movement in science and academia?

We see our work and the open access movement as two sides of the same coin. Just as people need access to journal articles to do good scientific research, they need access to legal information to do good legal research. It’s not enough to have access to American laws in the same way that it’s not enough to have access to the laws of physics. Knowing what the laws say is one thing, but properly understanding them in practice is something else entirely. That’s a gap we are working to fill.

With every passing year, we are seeing more and more people defending themselves in court, without hiring a lawyer. Last year, in federal courts alone, 52% of filings were made by people defending themselves, a whopping 18% increase from 2015.

To get a fair shake, these people need good tools and they need to be well informed. We believe the way to accomplish that is by providing high-quality legal data to organizations, researchers, journalists, and the public.

How has the internet changed free access to law? How has it made it more or less possible to gain access to free legal documents? How is your work technically mediated, and how do you create tools to empower legal recourse?

We collect hundreds of new legal documents from court websites every day and make them searchable on CourtListener.com. Within minutes of a new case being published, we can send you an email about it so that you know that it’s something you may want to read. Prior to the Internet, this kind of access was impossible.

But there are still major difficulties that we encounter while gathering these documents. For example, most opinions published by the courts don’t have unique identifiers, so there’s no easy way to cite them until they are blessed by a third party publisher. And of course, very few courts have websites with high-quality machine-readable data, so we spend a lot of effort making sure our crawlers are working properly.

One of our biggest projects, RECAP, collects data from a government-run website called PACER, where legal documents cost roughly ten cents per page. PACER is the biggest paywall in the world, holding more than a billion copyright-free documents, and we’re working on liberating as many of them as we can so that the public can easily and freely access them.

You run a variety of projects, technical and nontechnical, to help citizens gain greater access to legal documents. How does your work contribute to a more just and open society?

We approach this from two different angles. First, we try to make the legal industry more competitive by offering high-quality legal data and APIs. This lowers the barrier to entry that startups and researchers face, making it easier for them to focus on their innovations or research instead of on how to get expensive legal data.

Second, part of our mission is to create simple high-quality tools for people to use to research the law. This helps level the playing field by giving both sides of any legal dispute good tools. Some legal tools are incredibly sophisticated, but even the simplest tools are often quite expensive (it’s hard to know how expensive because prices are usually secret).

We see one of our roles as pushing the bar of what can be free. If Free Law Project, a tiny non-profit, can offer a tool for free, surely your organization can too.

How can non-lawyers get involved with your projects? How do you see your work as being more broadly related to legal advocacy? What kinds of contributions do you seek from the public?

This is a great question. We’re always seeking help from just about any- and everybody. All of our work is open source, and we’re always looking for people to help build new features or squash bugs. We have data entry work that we need volunteer corps to help fix, and we even have a collection of photos of judges that needs to be fleshed out. Essentially, if you have time and skills to volunteer, we can probably use your help.

You work mostly in the United States, but the Free Access to Law Movement is a global movement. How does your project advocate globally as well as in the US? What kinds of organizations are doing similar work around the world?

The Free Access to Law Movement is incredibly important and has gained a toehold in dozens of countries. You can see a list of all the members on their website, www.falm.info. A great way to get involved in the Free Access to Law Movement is to start at that site, find an organization in your country, and send them an email. There’s also the Law via the Internet conference every year that attracts free law advocates from around the world. For our part, working on the American legal system has proven to be more than enough!

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Today we’re announcing our last two keynotes and accepted sessions and speakers for this year’s CC Global Summit in Toronto, just two months away.

In addition to Ruth Okediji and Sarah Jeong, we are thrilled to welcome Ana Garzón Sabogal and Ashe Dryden, both consummate representatives of their fields. Our diverse set of keynotes were selected by community members due to their incredible contributions to open culture, diversity, and community building. These four women from Africa, Latin America, and North America are representative of our community’s commitment to fostering a diverse, collaborative commons fueled by gratitude.

Ana Garzón Sabogal works with collaborative learning, cultural management, activism and free culture. Based in Colombia, she has organised diverse projects including Radio Vallena, a collective radio station that traveled Colombia’s Pacific Coast to Panama City, sharing stories about migration and resistance and Territories. She is currently Director of the cultural foundation Más Arte Más Acción, part of Arts Collaboratory. Ana will be speaking about culture, open tools, and collaboration in open communities.

Ashe Dryden is a former White House fellow, programmer, diversity advocate and consultant, prolific writer, speaker, and creator of AlterConf and Fund Club. She’s one of the foremost experts on diversity in the tech industry. She’s currently writing two books: The Diverse Team and The Inclusive Event. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American, Wired, NPR, and more. Ashe will be speaking on the topic of open, diverse, and inclusive communities.

In addition, we are excited to announce our list of accepted speakers and sessions, which is made up of an incredible group of experts, advocates, and enthusiasts from all over the globe. All sessions are tagged across five tracks at the summit website and are subject to change, with final program schedule TBD. Thanks to everyone who answered our Call for Submissions!

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Web services company Cloudflare revealed late yesterday that it had experienced a large-scale memory leak. About two million websites use Cloudflare for services like content delivery and Internet security. Creative Commons uses Cloudflare, and we investigated this issue as soon as it was reported.

We have not found any cause for concern—as far as we know, CCID login data was not exposed. And because our donor data did not touch the Cloudflare service, we do not believe it was ever at risk. Additionally, Cloudflare has contacted us directly and informed us that we are not among the sites they know of that were affected by the leak.

Despite this, out of an abundance of caution, we are requiring all CCID users to reset their passwords. We are sending emails to CCID users asking them to do this immediately by going to login.creativecommons.org.

If there are any changes, we will be in touch to let you know. For more information about the Cloudflare memory leak, read the company’s incident report.

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Update: Shortly after publishing this post, we received word that Judge Hurley today has granted defendant FedEx Office’s motion to dismiss. You can read the order here [pdf]. This is the very result CC advocated for in its motion for leave to file an amicus brief,and we’re delighted with the outcome, the ruling, and the court’s analysis. The court found on the facts as presented by Great Minds, FedEx’s copying is permitted by the “unambiguous” terms of BY-NC-SA. Look for an in-depth post on the decision and its implications for users of the NC licenses and users of NC-licensed works next week.

Earlier this week, Judge Hurley issued an order denying our motion for leave to file an amicus brief at this stage in the litigation between Great Minds and FedEx Office. The central question in that case turns on the proper interpretation of the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (BY-NC-SA). In our motion, we sought permission to file a brief in support of FedEx Office and to assist the court in its interpretation of the license. As detailed in the motion, we believe it’s clear based on the facts alleged that the conduct engaged in by FedEx Office when it copied educational materials at the direction of school districts, whose use everyone agrees is non commercial, is not a violation of the license. You can read our rationale for this interpretation in our earlier blog post and in our motion [PDF] seeking permission to file an amicus brief, and learn why we’re fighting to protect non commercial uses here.

We’ll be monitoring the litigation for an update on the pending motion by FedEx Office to dismiss the case. We look forward to seeing how the court resolves the issue consistent with its order, and look forward to participating in the litigation if our assistance is needed at a later stage.

A special thanks to Andy Gass and Jonathan Ellis, our pro bono counsel at Latham & Watkins, for their assistance with the motion and amicus brief.

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Via a milestone translation effort, we are happy to announce the official translation of the Creative Commons 4.0 licenses into Arabic. An estimated 420 million people around the world speak Arabic, the sixth most spoken language in the world, making this translation effort the most far-reaching to date.

The Arabic translation is the result of an unprecedented collaboration among more than a dozen translation and technical team members from nine Arab countries. The translation team consulted with members of the CC community in the Arab world to achieve consensus on technical and legal terms. An online public consultation was conducted from July 12-21, 2016, following a face-to-face working session in Istanbul among several of the team leaders. The public consultation resulted in contributions by lawyers, active license users, linguists, translators, librarians, and representatives of cultural heritage institutions. Blogs, social media and a mailing list were used to inform the translation process. The Arabic translation was funded in part with the generous support of the Ford Foundation and Wikimedia Foundation.

Special congratulations go to Riyadh Al Balushi, Hala Essalmawi, Sadeek Hasna, Pierre el Khoury, and Mohammad el-Said for leading this multi-year effort, together with the terrific support of former CC regional coordinator Naeema Zarif.

The Croatian translation is also notable and expected to have significant impact. While using standard Croatian legal terminology, the translation will not only benefit Croatian speakers, but also speakers of affiliated languages across the Southeast Europe. The CC licenses are used by a range of Croatian-language users, from Wikipedia, various online news outlets, political parties, open access repositories, down to individual creators and users of free cultural works.

The public consultation process took place from January through June 2016. The translation team reached out especially to the IP lawyers, professional translators and the Wikipedia community during the consultation process. Special thanks are due to Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars and Diana Kovačević Remenarić. We want to also thank to Nena Antić from CC Serbia and Ante Jerić for their invaluable help and comments, as well as former CC regional coordinators John Weitzmann and Gwen Franck for supporting the translation.

Please visit our wiki for more details about these new translations. Congratulations to the teams on their work!

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