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Case Reporter Copyright and the Universal Citation System Florida State University Law Review Volume 24 Issue 1 Article 8 1996 Freeing the Law: Case Reporter Copyright and the Universal Citation System James H. Wyman [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.law.fsu.edu/lr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation James H. Wyman, Freeing the Law: Case Reporter Copyright and the Universal Citation System, 24 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 217 (1996) . https://ir.law.fsu.edu/lr/vol24/iss1/8 This Comment is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Florida State University Law Review by an authorized editor of Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW FREEING THE LAW: CASE REPORTER COPYRIGHT AND THE UNIVERSAL CITATION SYSTEM James J. Wyman VOLUME 24 FALL 1996 NUMBER 1 Recommended citation: James J. Wyman, Comment, Freeing the Law: Case Reporter Copyright and the Universal Citation System, 24 FLA. ST. U. L. REV. 217 (1996). FREEING THE LAW: CASE REPORTER COPYRIGHT AND THE UNIVERSAL CITATION SYSTEM* JAMES H. WYMAN** I. INTRODUCTION................................................................................................... 217 II. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND................................................................................. 221 A. The Copyrightability of Case Reporters...................................................... 221 1. Wheaton v. Peters................................................................................ 221 2. Callaghan v. Myers.............................................................................. 223 3. Banks Law Publishing Co. v. Lawyers’ Co-operative Publishing Co. ........................................................................................................ 225 B. The Rise of West and the Emergence of LEXIS.......................................... 228 1. West Publishing Company: “Everywhere Familiar” ............................ 228 2. The Arrival of LEXIS ........................................................................... 230 III. DECONSTRUCTING THE WEST “MONOPOLY”........................................................ 232 A. West Publishing Co. v. Mead Data Central, Inc........................................ 233 1. The Opinion.......................................................................................... 233 2. Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc.............. 237 3. Analysis ................................................................................................ 240 a. The Tenability of Mead After Feist................................................ 240 b. Public Policy................................................................................... 244 B. Mead Revisited: A Failed Attempt to Free Florida Law............................. 247 C. The “Crown Jewels”: Electronic Case Law Databases on the Internet ...... 254 IV. THE UNIVERSAL CITATION SYSTEM.................................................................... 259 A. Toward the Wisconsin Proposal ................................................................. 259 B. Analysis of the New Citation Format ......................................................... 264 1. Criticism of the Proposed Form............................................................ 266 a. A Citation to Nowhere.................................................................... 266 b. Citations to “Any Reliable Source”................................................. 266 c. Disadvantaging the Print Medium................................................ 268 d. Letting the Market Decide.............................................................. 271 2. Theory: Requirements of Legal Citation Form..................................... 272 3. Practice: The Potential Application of the Universal Citation Form in Florida ............................................................................................. 275 a. Background.................................................................................... 275 b. The Opinion Dissemination Process in Florida............................. 277 c. Implementing the New Citation Form ........................................... 278 V. CONCLUSION...................................................................................................... 280 I. INTRODUCTION K. must remember that the proceedings were not public; they could certainly, if the Court considered it necessary, become public, but the Law did not prescribe that they must be made * Copyright © 1996 James H. Wyman. 1996 Florida State University Law Review Ausley Scholarship paper. ** The author thanks his mother, Marjory R. Moran, Esq., who taught him a thing or two about principle, and Mr. DuBose Ausley, whose generous financial support facili- tated much of the research for this Comment. 217 218 FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 24:217 public. Naturally, therefore, the legal records of the case . were inaccessible to the accused and his counsel, consequently one did not know in general, or at least did not know with any pre- cision, what charges to meet in the first plea; accordingly it could only be by pure chance that it contained really relevant matter.1 Franz Kafka The striking and seemingly sudden rise of the Internet has had a dramatic effect upon public access to information. For a minimal monthly fee—or even for no charge2—citizens with a computer and a modem are able to instantly browse anything from their Senator’s most recent musings in the Congressional Record3 to the latest notices of proposed rulemaking in the Fed- eral Register.4 Perhaps nowhere have the ramifications of such readily available information been as intensely debated as they have been in the legal profession. For twenty years, case law has been electronically available to the bench and bar via the WESTLAW and LEXIS computer-assisted legal research serv- ices, albeit at a steep price.5 The prospect of an extensive body of case law archived on the Internet and inexpensive CD-ROMs has engendered a stormy and sometimes cantankerous debate among information activists, law librarians, and legal publishers. The courts of this country—for whom “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty . to say what the law is”6—have slowly be- gun to promulgate their decisions on “what the law is” over the Internet.7 In part because of the enterprising offices of several 1. FRANZ KAFKA, THE TRIAL 115 (Willa & Edwin Muir trans., Schocken Books 1988) (1925). 2. A number of communities throughout the United States have set up, generally through public libraries, FreeNet systems that provide free access to the Internet. See Rob Pegoraro, Free; The Info Freeway; On-Line on the Cheap, WASH. POST, June 28, 1995, at R5. 3. See Search Full Text of the Congressional Record—104th Congress, available at http://thomas.loc.gov/home/r104query.html (Aug. 16, 1996). 4. See, e.g., GPO Access on the Web, available at http://thorplus.lib.purdue.edu/vlibrary/ reference/gpo/index.html (Aug. 16, 1996). 5. Both WESTLAW and LEXIS charge upwards of $200 per hour for the use of their services. See Susan Hansen, Fending Off the Future, AM. LAW., Sept. 1994, at 76. 6. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 177 (1803). 7. Although a bulletin board system (BBS) is not strictly a part of the Internet, each U.S. Court of Appeals has a BBS through which decisions can be retrieved for 75 cents a mi- nute. Laura Mansnerus, Easing Limits on Legal Publishing, N.Y. TIMES, Oct. 9, 1995, at D5. In addition, many state supreme courts place their opinions on a BBS as well. However, a number of courts delete older cases on their BBSs and replace them with newer cases. Morenike Efuntade, Alternative Case Citation Issue Examined by Joint DOJ-Judicial Group, U.S. L. WEEK—DAILY ED., May 1, 1995, available in LEXIS, News library, Wires file. Moreo- ver, a BBS can only be accessed by dialing—usually while incurring long distance tolls—a dedicated phone line the court has set up for its BBS. See American Civil Liberties Union v. Reno, 929 F. Supp. 824, 833-34 (E.D. Pa. 1996). 1996] FREEING THE LAW 219 law schools around the nation,8 the opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court,9 all U.S. Courts of Appeals,10 and over a third of all state supreme courts11 are now available on the Internet’s World Wide Web. Far from providing a complete body of case law to the user, however, these Web sites generally offer opinions dating back a few years at most.12 More important, though, is the fact that the opinions on the Internet are virtually useless to anyone who wishes to cite them in a court document.13 Almost all federal courts and a large num- ber of state courts require citations that contain the page num- bers of West Publishing Company’s case reporters.14 Although it is in almost all other respects an outstanding corporate citizen, West’s assertion of copyright in its case reporter pagination15 8. See, e.g., Bill Rankin, Law Libraries: Emory Offering Court Rules, Legal Docu- ments, ATLANTA J. & CONST., Feb. 14, 1996, at D7. 9. Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, available at http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/ supct.table.html (Aug. 16, 1996) (providing all decisions since 1990). 10. A list of the U.S. Courts of Appeals, the addresses of the Web sites containing their opinions, and the dates of the earliest opinions available may be found in the Ap- pendix to this Comment. 11. As of August 1996, 19 state supreme courts had World Wide Web sites that pro- vided and archived their opinions.
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