[8906] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
US Supreme Court Briefs-Comments to Court?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alan Sugarman)
Sat Dec 11 13:21:48 1993
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1993 13:15:23 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Sugarman <sugarman@panix.com>
To: com-priv@psi.com
Cc: cni-copyright@cni.org
Note - resent message with subject included
The United States Supreme Court has been testing transmitting tiff files
of briefs to participants in the Hermes opinions dissemination network...
It is called Project Mercury.
We are receiving the files now. It works, but is slow and then you have
to deal with the image files and OCR. We think that the Court should
allocated its resources to developing an EDGAR like project to receive brief
files in SGML format, at least for the 125 cases or so that it accepts
each year.
Only people with sufficient capital will be able to handle these files and
OCR them on a continuous basis. In a sense, the image dissemination
methodology maintains the high barriers of collecting and disseminating
briefs.
The equipment being used for Project Mercury was contributed by West
Publishing to the Court.
The program is being run by James Donovan, Director, Data Systems, Supreme
Court of the United States, 1 First St., N.E., Washington, D.C.
The Court administrator in charge overall is the Clerk,
William K. Suter.
We have been asked to submit comments prior to December 17, 1993
Alan Sugarman
HyperLaw.
