Free Access to Law and Open Source Software
Daniel Poulin, Andrew Mowbray and Pierre-Paul Lemyre
Abstract. Accessing basic legal information is of fundamental importance, however before the Internet, the provision of legal databases was entirely commercial and accessing it was costly. The Legal Information Institutes played a central role in changing that, today in many countries, primary legal information now flows directly and freely from courts and governments to citizens.
Not surprisingly, most of the LIIs are strongly reliant upon open source software. The approaches favored by the LIIs closely match open source trends: avoidance of monopolistic control, reuse of information, standardization, tools sharing, avoidance of revenues models depending on selling information as a product.
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