A federal appeals panel ruled Tuesday that West Group, the legal-publishing giant, is not entitled to key copyright protections for its hugely popular database of judicial opinions. Experts said the ruling could lead to much lower prices for legal research and could reshuffle the multibillion-dollar legal publishing business, an industry West has dominated for more than seven decades. Prices will probably now fall a lot and you're likely to see venture capitalists, who had been scared off by the legal cloud over this industry, start pouring money into all sorts of competitors. West, based in Eagan, Minn., has essentially served as the country's legal archivist, with its bound volumes so ubiquitous they're found even in Ally McBeal's fictional law firm. The company compiles legal opinions from judges' chambers across the country, formats and summarizes them and adds its own system of page citations.
Lawyers use West's pagination system to refer to past cases.
West officials counter that their product deserves copyright protection because the company enhances the information by editing, formatting and, in some cases, correcting judicial opinions. But in one of the rulings, the court held that West did not change or add enough to the opinions to enjoy copyright protection. West officials, who said they would appeal the decision, contended that the company would not be affected financially by the rulings, in part because West derives only a fraction of its revenue from licensing its pagination system to other companies. James Rittinger, an attorney for the company, pointed out that several West features, such as syllabuses and headnotes, still can't be legally copied. He said the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals came to the opposite conclusion from the 2nd Circuit, so that legal questions in the case have not been fully resolved.