Open Access News

Simon Chester, Free Public Access to Legal Information? Slaw, December 26, 2006.  Excerpt:

Slaw readers may have missed the recent controversy in the legislative debates of Guam. A fight over access to legal information - and whether a publicly funded service constituted unfair competition. The full story is in today's Pacific Daily News and a month ago in the Marianas Variety

Guam's court system wants to improve public access to local laws, government rules, executive orders, court decisions and attorney general opinions. All this for a cost of about $1,000. That's all it will take to make the court's Compiler of Laws Web site searchable.

But Jacqueline Taitano Terlaje representing a competing legal research service said during a public hearing that it would go out of business if the court does that.

Existing online resources already provide "meaningful access" to Guam residents, she said. "The people of Guam are not crying out for a legal research database. The Guam government should have no business entering into the legal research market, which caters only to the legal community. The government, she added, should simply provide the basic service such as the listing of the documents and the “next level” should be left with the private business sector.

Guam law currently prohibits the Compiler of Laws from publishing text-based searchable data on its Web site. While Guam law and similar information is available for free on the court's Web site and other government Web sites, there is no search function, which means residents need to search through legal texts, rules and opinions on their own to find information about a specific topic....

I've omitted the text of the bill that would permit Guam's compiler of laws to add a search engine.

Comment.  It's hard to believe the premise here:  the laws of Guam are already OA, and the only question is whether to add a search engine.  A private company objects that a public search engine would put it out of business.  Where does one even begin? 

First, the need to know the law is not limited to professional lawyers.  Second, even lawyers need open access and searchability, and providing it benefits everyone.  Third, private-sector companies have an understandable private interest in protecting their revenue, even at the expense of the public interest, but government agencies are charged to put the public interest first.  Fourth, if adding a search engine to an existing online public resource, for a one-time cost of $1,000, would really endanger a private-sector company, then the company should already be looking for another line of work.  Even without Guam's public investment, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft might index the laws tomorrow, or a citizen might do so with a Google custom search engine.  Trying to keep OA information hard to find is a poor business model and an even worse public policy.