[Commons-Law] Developing a Public Legal Space

[rohan george]

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I'm intrigued by your ideas on public legal spaces, but i have a few questions concerning the practicalities of the matter. 
Firstly, i know legal journals are usually out of the question to legally make a publicly accesible resource due to the fact that they are protected by their own copyright laws.

However, with relation to basic legal materials such as case law and bare acts,

Why is it not do-able? Or, if it is, why has it not been done yet?
In relation to this, i must ask, 
1. Do you know how sites like manupatra obtained their cases, cause I'd really like to know. Did they just hire an army of data entry operators, or is there some other way? Not the later cases, most of which, if you are willing to suffer, are available on Judis, but the earlier ones.
2. Does'nt every bare act ever released get published, even if for a short while, on the relevant departmental homepage? If so, even those should be easy to obtian, and the older major acts, and some of the minor acts as well, are already available in full text format on various private sites online.
3. The SEBI and RBI website, as far as i know, and whenever theyre up, provide access to all major notifications issued by them, so those too should be accesible. The other departments could pose a problem perhaps. 

My point in asking all these questions is, is it really that hard to get together a legal portal for free and open access to all? And, most importantly, with the type of contact which organisations like Sarai and ALF must be having with programmers and other members of the IT community, it isnt that hard to get together a properly cross-referenced, easily and comprehensively searchable database of at least primary legal materials. If you'll note, that is basically what sites like manupatra ans lexsite provide at 16 per judgement,as you said.

Organisations like yours and Sarai's may or may not have financial backing, but you do have access to a pool of skilled labour which is dedicated, or at the very least, interested in a cause. I think if resources are pooled together and efforts coordinated, this would not be such an impossible idea.