

Recap: A Firefox Plugin That Liberates Paywalled Court Records - dc2k08
https://www.recapthelaw.org/

======
AndrewDucker
What a fantastic idea - liberating documents one by one, whilst making life
easier (and cheaper) for people looking for that data!

I applaud the people behind this.

------
mikeytown2
What about sites like <http://openjurist.org/> ? Disclaimer: I've currently
working on improving this site

------
anthonymc
I showed this to a lawyer friend of mine who also has a background in
technology. While he thought it was a nice tool for preliminary or casual
research, he said that ultimately he will still need to go and purchase the
documents so that he is absolutely certain they are the originals since there
doesn't seem to be a publicly available way to verify them.

A possible solution to this would be a published hash value from the original
source.

~~~
potatolicious
"A possible solution to this would be a published hash value from the original
source."

If you get the government to agree to _that_ , I think it would be trivial to
get them to agree to release the documents themselves...

~~~
ramchip
Not necessarily, since the problem is mostly bandwidth and distribution.

~~~
anthonymc
That is what I was thinking. Publishing a hash along with the listing of the
article would essentially be free as far as bandwidth costs are concerned
which is what is supposed to be the reason for the fee.

------
eli
Oh, now that's clever. I bet Carl Malamud wishes he thought of that.

~~~
igurari
It's clever, but we'll have to wait and see how much it actually adds to the
collection of documents freely available. The bulk of the Recap repository was
seeded with documents Malamud collected. Of course, Recap appears to be a nice
way to actually interact with that collection.

~~~
eli
I don't think you should discount how much of a difference this makes. It
slides right in to users' existing workflow requiring far less effort on their
part.

~~~
igurari
I don't think I am discounting how much of a difference it makes. My point is
simply that without the 1 million documents Malamud handed over, the tool
would be largely useless for many months if not years. What Recap does is make
Malamud's documents accessible to lawyers (they are presently stuck in massive
tar files at bulk.resource.org), and the combined efforts of Malamud and the
Recap people, nicely complement each other.

