With PlainSite I wanted to see if it was possible to build a business model around public information that is actually available to the public, unlike the traditional model that Lexis, West and Bloomberg use. The dockets are all available for free. The documents are all available for free. Cleaned-up USPTO data is available for free. What isn't free is analytics on the data of the kind that generally only lawyers would care about.
Furthermore, the data is being uploaded to the Internet Archive, which PlainSite then re-downloads. Anyone can use it. If you don't like what I'm doing with it, you can do something else.
Aaron was an entrepreneur as well as someone who cared deeply about open access to data. So no, I don't think there's much irony.
"Furthermore, the data is being uploaded to the Internet Archive, which PlainSite then re-downloads. Anyone can use it. If you don't like what I'm doing with it, you can do something else."
Excellent idea (UK resident so the actual information is of no use to me but the model is good)
[1] http://www.plainsite.org/pro/index.html