Minneapolis Story on JURIS

[James Love <love@essential.org>]

TAP-INFO INTERNET DISTRIBUTION LIST

TAXPAYER ASSETS PROJECT
CROWN JEWELS CAMPAIGN - JURIS
November 17, 1993

The following story, written by business columnist Tony Carideo,
appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (MST), on Tuesday,
November 16, 1993.  There is an information superhighway story
within this information superhighway story.  The JURIS issue was
brought to Carideo's attention by a staff member of the MST, who
pulled a discussion of a meeting with the Department of Justice
about the future of JURIS, which TAP had posted on the Internet. 
Carideo contacted Vance Opperman, the president of West
Publishing, who provided Carideo with copies of messages that
West had posted on the Internet, countering earlier TAP-INFO
posts.  We in turn provided Carideo with copies of other TAP-INFO
posts about JURIS.  Carideo also used an online database service
to locate James Dabney, who represented Mead Data Central in its
litigation with West Publishing over the copyright of page number
issue in the late 1980s.  Dabney is quoted in the story as
telling Carideo that "Mead Data is not in a position legally" to
provide Justice with the West page numbers, which implies that
under the terms of the secret West/Mead antitrust settlement,
Mead may have been the only company that could have bid on the
JURIS contract.


     Minneapolis Star Tribune, Tuesday, November 16, 1993

     TAXPAYER ASSETS PROJECT ARGUES FOR MORE
     ACCESS TO INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY
     by Tony Carideo

Call it one of the early dramas along the information
superhighway.

Speeding alone in one lane is the politically well connected West
Publishing Co., producer of WESTLAW, the premier legal document
database that much of the nation's legal community uses to
research legal cases.  In the other is a scrappy Washington based
taxpayer group called the Taxpayer Assets Project.

The Assets Project played a pivotal role in opening the SEC's
$100 million Electronic Data Gathering Analysis and Retrieval
System (EDGAR) to the Internet, the worldwide computer network
that is fast becoming the nation's de facto electronic
superhighway.  (EDGAR is a database of SEC filings - 10-Ks, 10-Qs
and other such documents -- now being fed by roughly 2,500
corporations.)

There's even a damsel in distress, to hear Taxpayer Assets tell
it.  Her name is JURIS, a legal database available only to 15,000
government employees.  But she's lying in the road and will be
dead by the end of the year.  To hear West tell it, JURIS is old,
decrepit and deserves to die.

The advocacy group maintains that West intends to commit
vehicular homicide, claiming that it is killing JURIS to preserve
its document page numbering system that holds both the government
and the public hostage.

Vivid images aside, millions of dollars of profits and revenues
are at stake for West, one of the area's most prominent private
companies.

As it did with EDGAR, the Taxpayer Assets Project group argues
that JURIS should be opened to the Internet, a move that West
vehemently opposes.  And even if JURIS dies, Taxpayer Assets is
pushing for government action to break West's grip on the way
legal documents are referenced and numbered, a tactic that
strikes directly at the company's dominance of the legal and
legislative reporting industry.

The central question that has been percolating for several years
now:  Who, if anyone, owns the law?

So far, West and other data publishers have successfully defended
their franchises in court and Congress.  Rep. Barney Frank, D-
Mass, last year introduced legislation to exclude page numbers
from copyright protection.  The bill died, in spite of testimony
from Ralph Oman, then the government's register of copyrights,
who told Congress that "factual elements like volume and page
numbers, for example, simply contain insufficient originality to
warrant protection."

Then in September, West announced that it was pulling out of the
JURIS contract.  Since West has only been renting the reams of
data it was supplying to the government, the effect of West's
decision is that JURIS will be shut down by the end of the year.

Vance Opperman, West's new president, says JURIS will die because
nobody else bid on the contract.  What's more, he said, the
government will save money and be more efficient by using
technologically advanced private databases.  "It became obvious
to us that the government can easily get a much larger database
at much less that it's paying for those hours of usage," Opperman
said.  "They can get WESTLAW."

One might be prompted to ask why Mead Data Central, producer of
LEXIS, the only database publisher to use West's page numbers,
didn't bid on the contract?  Said James Dabney, the New York City
lawyer who has represented Mead in the only clear challenge to
the West hegemony:  "Suffice it to say that Mead Data is not in a
position legally to do that," adding that it was his guess that
other publishers also shrank away from "running the [legal] gamut
that Mead did."

James Love, head of the Taxpayer Assets group, fires back that
nobody will bid on the contract because it would cost a new data
supplier almost $6 million and six months to fill the hold that
West will leave when it pulls out.  Love also quotes Department
of Justice estimates that the government's annual legal database
bill will jump from $12 million to $18 million, which Opperman
says is "absolutely untrue."

Those are the basic arguments.  From there, things get nasty.

Opperman accuses Taxpayer Assets of trying to "steal" a system
that West has owned for more than 100 years and of being a tool
of West's competitors -- asking aloud whether the group is being
funded by them.  Love denies both charges, saying that he's only
trying to provide electronic access to public documents -- not
West's proprietary notes, heads and case summaries -- and that
his group's funding comes from three nonprofit foundations.  He,
in turn, worries that Opperman is using his hard wired
connections into Vice President Al Gore's office to short circuit
the debate.

Heat from all this aside, something is wrong here.  One can
understand a company's right to its own notes, summaries and
headings, and somewhat less, to its "arrangement" of the data.

But to page numbers?

Said Dabney:  "It's a remarkable situation when the government of
the United States is faced with claims that prevent it from
identifying the decisions of U.S. Courts by reference . . . I
must say, I have always believed that that was a boneheaded
proposition."

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