What’s New with Wu

When National Public Radio held its first planning board meeting in late 1969, to decide what NPR would be, here was the contribution of one of its planners from the University of Texas (taken from Jack Mitchell’s book, “Listener Supported” (2005).

Six Assumptions

1. That our society is in the midst of a revolution.
2. That the revolution is rooted in a reexamination of values.
3. That artificial barriers to understanding are common in our society.
4. That these barriers prevent us from making rational choices as we deal with the revolution.
5. That a means of eliminating barriers is needed.
6. That NPR is probably not the means – but might be.

I just spent two days at a great Stanford - Google conference.

One of the ideas to emerge from the conference was that its time to get serious about working for a little more unlicensed spectrum.   There’s a chance to ask for that in the D block.  More coming soon.

Carl Malamud, his team at Public.Resource.org, with the support of Larry Lessig made a deal with Fastcase - and the consequence is more free federal caselaw than ever before.

We’re putting these new materials on Altlaw.org — and I should add that Altlaw is undergoing some big improvements over the next month or so.

Altlaw is now facing two direct quasi-commercial competitors, which makes everything so much more interesting !

In support of my upcoming piece on Sundance piracy, here’s the films I tried to find — mostly on Pirate’s Bay and MiniNova, but occasionally on YouTorrent.
2007
Manda Bala
Padre Nuestro
Hear and Now
Grace is Gone
Teeth
Once
Two By the River
Chasing Ghosts
Copenhagen Cycles
Austism Every Day

2008
A Complete History of Sexual Failure
Diary of Death
Hamlet 2
Phoebe in Wonderland
Hell Ride
Absurdistan
American Teen
Secrecy
Choke

Altlaw is getting better and better — check it out!

- Supreme Court coverage back to the beginning

- Courts of appeals back to the 1970s

- Streamlined, better searching

At this rate we’ll be ready to leave BETA early next year, and release version 1.0.

Credit need be given to Stuart Sierra, of course, but also to Tim Stanley and his gang at Justica.

While I’ve long been sympathetic to the idea of MuniWiFi projects, today in Slate I write about why they aren’t working.

In our rush to describe Altlaw to bloggers and the press, I think we may have done too little to discuss some of the other, complimentary efforts, to make U.S. law and the law of other nations easier to access.

I discussed LII and Findlaw in my last post, both of which I use heavily, and have many important features we don’t. Other important efforts are found outside the United States: such as the CanLII site, from my home and native land, AsianLII, the WorldLII group, and surely others.

What we do think is distinctive about Altlaw isn’t our databases — not one bit — but rather the search engine function of altlaw.

Despite it being August, Altlaw is beginning to get a bit of attention so perhaps a few comments.

Obviously the program is beta and unfinished. We don’t think, in its present form, that Altlaw can serve as a full substitute for a commercial legal database. But the crucial word is YET. With help or on our own we’re going to do at least the following before we consider Altlaw beyond beta:

• Expand coverage; both in terms of dates and jurisdictions;
• Link citations with cases
• Create smart, advanced searches, beyond which other databases have.

We have a long wish list of things we’d like to do. And it should be fun to get there.

We’d love new ideas, suggestions, help and support of any kind!

I think its also worth acknowledging what has come before in this area, which we haven’t exceeded.  Findlaw is still a great resource, and best of all is Cornell’s incredible LII.   We have a long way to go to get anywhere near those resources.

This is a project we’ve been keeping under wraps; and while we’re still in beta, Altlaw.org is up and running.

What’s altlaw? Altlaw is the first public domain completely free legal search engine. Right now it lets you search the last 10 years of Supreme Court and Court of Appeals cases.

This is just a beta, without the full coverage we’d like to have in time, but it will come..

That’s about how much it might cost to get your hands on nationwide spectrum equivalent to a UHF station.

Perhaps the nature conservancy should buy itself some.