I gave a presentation at the recent Law Teacher’s Conference at the University of Pretoria. Only about 3 or 4 people came to the session where I presented with Kerry Anderson from SAFLII. It is unfortunate that there was so little interest in this important topic (the mechanics of open access to the law and to legal materials) and I hope that there are more people at future talks about this important issue.

Open Law Project presentation from Paul Jacobson on Vimeo.

This video is supposed to have an audio soundtrack which seems to have disappeared … sorry about that!

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open access, open law, open law project, university of pretoria, law teachers

This is a post I submitted to the iCommons site. You can find that version here.

There are a number South African legal resources with varying degrees of accessibility and completeness. On the one hand there are a number of official sources of law and legal information from organs of the State like national, provincial and local legislative bodies as well as the superior courts. Official texts are generally not protected by copyright and are therefore open to all. When it comes to legislation, section 12(8)(a) of the Copyright Act provides as follows:

“No copyright shall subsist in official texts of a legislative, administrative or legal nature, or in official translations of such texts, or in speeches of a political nature or in speeches delivered in the course of legal proceedings, or in news of the day that are mere items of press information.”

Where copyright would vest is in unofficial texts created by publishers or any person who takes an official text and reformats that official text or otherwise creates a derivative of it. This is where access to legal resources becomes somewhat more difficult. Commercial republications of the official texts are expensive and quite simply inaccessible to the vast majority of the population. By way of example, costs for a set of legislation can be as high as R4,600 for a monthly subscription on CD-ROM or around R3,200 for the 2006/7 printed edition purchased from one of the local legal publishers. In contrast, legislation is available for free from government websites although these collections are not necessarily complete or readily accessible to a visitor to the website concerned.

Similarly, judgements handed down in South Africa’s superior courts are, in theory, available to the public although this is something of a fiction in practice. These judgements are not published in a convenient format by the courts. The legal publishers, on the other hand, republish judgements considered to be “reportable” and then sell these judgements as part of their law reports incorporating commentary on and summaries of the more pertinent judgements at a high price for most people. While these reports are fairly well organised and comprehensive and are generally available on a subscription basis, a subscription to Juta’s South African Law Reports can cost R5,712 for a single user for a year for the online version and R15,112 for a quarterly update and R16,052 for monthly updates to the CD-ROM versions.

Fortunately there are initiatives to make these important legal resources more readily available to the South African public. Perhaps the most ambitious of these initiatives is the South African Legal Information Institute which is collating and scanning judgements and legislation from 16 sub-Saharan countries. This content is being made freely available on the web, at least for non-commercial purposes. Another project which is under development is the Open Law Project which aims to create a comprehensive legal reference work pitched at, and for the benefit of, the South African public. These two initiatives and other similar initiatives are motivated to promote open access to the law by the people who are governed by it.

At present the open law initiatives are slowly gaining on their commercial equivalents and the law is becoming more and more accessible to a broader cross-section of the population. This shift is tremendously important because more meaningful and open access to the law is necessary for the promotion and protection of a number of fundamental rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights which, in turn, shapes the legal, political, social and economic frameworks of South African society and government. To quote the Declaration on Free Access to Law:

“Legal information institutes of the world, meeting in Montreal, declare that:

• Public legal information from all countries and international institutions is part of the common heritage of humanity. Maximising access to this information promotes justice and the rule of law;
• Public legal information is digital common property and should be accessible to all on a non-profit basis and free of charge;
• Independent non-profit organisations have the right to publish public legal information and the government bodies that create or control that information should provide access to it so that it can be published.
• Public legal information means legal information produced by public bodies that have a duty to produce law and make it public. It includes primary sources of law, such as legislation, case law and treaties, as well as various secondary (interpretative) public sources, such as reports on preparatory work and law reform, and resulting from boards of inquiry. It also includes legal documents created as a result of public funding.”

For more information on South African legal resources, where they can be found, and who owns these texts, check out the Open Law Project wiki page . If you would like to participate in the Open Law Project node on icommons.org, see the node page, here.

I mentioned in my last post that the OLP is now being run through The African Commons Project. TACP is also the local facilitator of the iCommons presence in South Africa and I have created a node on the iCommons site dedicated to the OLP. The node will facilitate discussion about the scope and operation of the OLP so if you would like to be involved in the OLP and give input, feel free to register on the iCommons site and participate in the node. I don’t believe this is only open to members of the legal community. The OLP is intended to serve members of the public as a whole so if you feel you have some input then I’d like to hear it.

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open law project, olp, icommons, node, discussion

I had a meeting with Heather Ford this morning about the OLP. Heather is the executive director of iCommons and a a big part of the African Commons Project, the parent entity/facilitator of iCommons in South Africa and Creative Commons South Africa.

The outcome of the meeting is that the OLP will be run as an initiative of the African Commons Project going forward. This means the OLP has the support of a major player in the open culture space in South Africa. I think it is a great fit and I am really excited about what we can do together. A big benefit of this development is that the OLP will hopefully be seen as a more credible initiative to facilitate public and free access to good quality legal information.

Going forward one of our challenges is to secure seed funding to get the OLP on to its feet. The funding is intended to develop an initial body of content to get the wiki going and develop it to the point where it tips and the community takes over the content creation. We also need some funding to cover our costs going forward. If you are in a position to help out or know someone who is interested, please give us a shout. My email address is to the right in the sidebar.

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the african commons project, open law project, initiative, heather ford, progress, developments

I received a link to a wiki called Jurispedia which seems to be a global version of the Open Law Project. The wiki runs on MediaWiki software (the same software that powers Wikipedia and the OLP wiki). What is interesting about Jurispedia (besides its global approach) is the fact that is is based on an implementation at academic institutions. In other words, a university will join the initiative and make contributions to the project (at least, this is the case if I understand it correctly). According to Jurispedia:

The project is open for cooperation with other partners. Any other teams of researchers or Faculties of Law in the whole world can freely join us. Participation in JurisPedia requires only human implication on the shared law.

What is also interesting is that the content on the site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.0 license (the current version of this license can be found here). The OLP wiki is currently licensed under a GPL FDL Free Doc license because it is published on Wikia. As I understand this license, it is the equivalent of a Creative Commons Attribution license which is fine with me. Ideally the content published through the OLP must be as close to the public domain as it can get, if not in the public domain. Crediting authors of parts of the overall work is a good idea because there is acknowledgement of their valuable contributions.

There is some merit to a NonCommercial license because I do envisage the OLP charging a nominal license fee for commercial application of the content as a way to keep the OLP self-sustaining but this is a discussion point at the moment.

I am working on developing the OLP under the auspices of a like-minded NGO and will hopefully have something to report pretty soon. This has been a bit slow going but I think the OLP is moving in the right direction. I hope to see the OLP begin to develop a considerable amount of South African legal content before the end of 2007 and take its place alongside the likes of Jurispedia as one of the larger initiatives to bring the law to the people who are subject to it, at least in South Africa.

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jurispedia, creative commons, update, open law project, olp, wiki, gpl fdl

iCommons has been made an offer of $100 000 funding towards the upcoming iCommons summit in Dubrovnik in Croatia. The catch is the $100 000 must be matched by $100 000 to be raised by iCommons itself in 7 days! So iCommons, under the leadership of the remarkable Heather Ford, is campaigning for the balance using a very interesting approach:

A very generous sponsor will donate $100,000 to iCommons if we can raise a matching grant of $100,000 in just 7 days. Powered by our amazing community of bloggers around the world, we’re going to do just that by getting 21 Visionary Patrons to each name one of the base camps on the way to the Summit for $3,000 - taking us up 21 base camps to reach the $63,000 Summit (our sister organisation, Creative Commons, is raising the rest). Each base camp on this epic journey will be named after the sponsor, and sponsors will be able to display buttons indicating their support of this wonderful event.

So why would you want to support this effort? Well, for starters, iCommons is charged with promoting Creative Commons and related content licenses which enable meaningful collaboration and sharing of content. Creative Commons licenses are flexible tools that allow content creators to share their valuable and unique content with the world and yet have that wonderful material continue to support both them and their communities. In other words -

The iCommons Summit is an annual event bringing together 300 visionaries of the free Internet to map out strategies for fostering innovation, free culture and open science around the world. With thought leaders from the world’s top Internet companies who are leading the way in developing an innovative culture in which entrepreneurs around the world can be a part, this event is charting a brighter future for all of us. If the Internet is a part of what makes your business successful, or if you want to support an organisation that is helping to use the Internet for education, science and local innovation, you need to be one of our Visionary Patrons. (Find out more about this year’s Summit)

Old Mutual’s Tony Lankester said this about why they’re funding the Summit: ‘We are investing in the Summit because we see it as a vital incubator of great, innovative thinking around the internet. For the internet to grow to the next level there needs to be a step-change in the way we think about it, talk about it, engage with it, and use it. And that sort of change can only happen if a group of passionate individuals are given the space to pioneer the kind of debate and create a robust framework to take the internet forward. We like the spirit of Creative Commons, and we like the opportunities it can give us in the developing world to take this wonderful technology wider and deeper into society and become an agent of change in its own right.

If innovation, free culture and scientific development is important to you then support this initiative and either donate money yourself or speak to someone who can and wants to be one of the 21 patrons of the iCommons Summit and one of the inspired supporters of such a noble effort. Heck, if I had the $3 000 (roughly R21 000), I’d do it in a flash.

Then again, perhaps you could join me and pledge a donation quickly. Perhaps we, as a community, could be one of the 21 Visionary Patrons and let the world know what South African bloggers can do when inspired. What do you say? Why don’t we come together and be a positive force for change. Pledge what you can and remember the overall goal of R21 000. What do you think? I’ll come up with R1 000. Will you join me?

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icommons summit, 21 visionary patrons, dubrovnik, croatia, funding, $3 000

I came across a post on Lexblog over the weekend titled “Niche bloggers could threaten legal publishers” which I found pretty interesting. The post referred to another post by Ron Friedmann where he pointed out that publishing tools like blogs, wikis and podcasts enable law firms and other publishers to publish legal content very easily and potentially to a pretty big audience, thus potentially threatening legal publishers.

This is pretty much what the Open Law Project is - an initiative to harness the knowledge of the community and publish legal content using these publishing tools. This is a threat to the legal publishers who tend to publish their content behind a walled garden. Of course they have quite a bit of legal content at their disposal but as independent publishers start to publish content of a similar quality and perhaps even quantity, legal publishers will start to lose their grip in the market, especially if the independently produced content is free.

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open law project, free, legal content, legal publishers, threat

I just realised how big the Open Law Project can become. I was in the bath thinking about the OLP (I do my best thinking in the bath) and I realised that the scope of the OLP is quite a bit bigger than I initially thought - assuming it is going to be all it can be. I am working on a proposal at the moment to help me obtain an initial round of funding to develop enough content on the OLP’s wiki to hopefully cause the project to tip and entice people to start contributing to the body of content on the wiki. The content will be in English and will really be a representation of the vast amount of legal content that could possibly be developed for the OLP.

It occurred to me that the majority of this country do not speak English as a first language. Going further, we have 11 official languages in South Africa and for the OLP to become a worthwhile resource for South Africans, it must be presented in a language the majority of the population understand, at the very least. I am therefore beginning to see that the work I am seeking to fund is really just the tip of the tip of the iceberg here. Down the line not only must a comprehensive body of legal content be written and published on the wiki but that content must be maintained on an ongoing basis and translated into the major languages spoken and written in South Africa, if not all 11 official languages. That is a pretty big project and one which is likely to require substantial funding. The upside is that as the OLP develops, it can create work for legally trained people who are interested in sharing their knowledge and using their writing skills. The end result will be a body of content that is accessible by and intelligible to the vast majority of South Africans.

Who wants to help?

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open law project, olp, funding, legal content, legal information, official languages, localisation, translations, employment

This is the companion blog for the Open Law Project.

There are very few sources of legal content in South Africa on South African law. Google can be tremendously helpful in finding what is available but, as yet, there is no single comprehensive legal reference work on the Web on South African law. The problem with this is that South Africans are governed and affected by South African law and this law is not very accessible to them.

The Open Law Project is an initiative aimed at creating a comprehensive and reliable legal reference work that is created by the South African legal community and which is available to South Africans who have access to an Internet connection and a web browser for free. The intention is to make the content on this site available for free to the South African public, the content posted to this site can not be subject to copyright. Copyright makes the content less accessible. That being said, contributions from all members of the South African legal community are most welcome and appreciated. This is an opportunity to contribute back to the South African public.

Tags: open law project, free legal information, wiki, community resource