LEXIS BATTLES AN INTERNET UPSTART OVER DISTRIBUTING CASE LAW ONLINE
U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff is expected to issue a
preliminary ruling that will decide whether Jurisline.com, an
Internet company that offers gargantuan databases of court
opinions copied from CD-ROMs by another company called Lexis,
violates federal law. Jurisline's creator, Lee Eichen, leased
Lexis's Law on Disc set in 1999, copied the information, and
then posted it online. Jurisline provides free access to the
information, selling advertising space to other companies to
make a profit. In an effort to avoid legal action, the company
filed suit seeking declaratory judgment that their actions were
lawful. Lexis immediately filed a counter suit asking for $25
million in punitive damages. Lexis, which ironically built its
own large databases by copying from a company called West
Publishing, argues that Jurisline's actions could negate years
of effort and large sums of money spent to acquire the
information it leases online. West Publishing and Lexis now
dominate the industry, and their parent companies are currently
working together to remove online competition by lobbying
Congress to pass a bill that would prohibit others from taking
large bodies of "substantial" information from databases if the
action harms the original collector. The Supreme Court ruled in
a 1991 telephone book case that "sweat of brow" when compiling a
directory out of large amounts of non-copyrighted information
does not qualify the collector for legal protection. (Wall Street Journal,
15 May 2000)