What problems in the American legal system does an “open access” approach aim to fix?
Our legal system and our laws are amazingly complex.The last thing we need is to make it even harder by keeping our laws trapped in expensive books with bad indexes. [Note: Bound copies of the 21-volume Oregon’s Revised Statues set are, for example, priced at $390.] Copyright has been used in the past as a tool to encourage people to produce legal materials. It was a reasonable strategy when publication was harder and more expensive, but it always required the courts to keep a very close eye to make sure people didn’t overreach and use copyright as a weapon to make law unaccessible. Now, again with the help of the Internet, we can pare copyright in legal materials back further, so there’s less risk in the first place that it’ll be used to obstruct access to law. How does open access law work? What’s the road map for getting from where we are to a future where the law is more accessible? Step one, which we’ve mostly got, is to make sure that anything legally binding is actually printed
