Restricting Access to Video of Proceedings of 2010 Conference on Privacy & Public Access to Court Records

Colleagues:

I’ve just learned that video of the proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Privacy and Public Access to Court Records held 4-5 March 2010 in Williamsburg, Virginia, USA, will be distributed only on DVD, for a price of $65.00 plus $6.99 shipping and handling. (No Web distribution, no free distribution, no distribution of a text version).

[The conference was co-sponsored by the Center for Legal and Court Technology and the National Center for State Courts, with assistance from the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.]

Click here for a list of topics discussed at the conference.

Given the importance of the topics discussed at the conference to current discussion about legal publishing and public access to legal information, given that the conference participants included leading U.S. judges and policy makers respecting these issues, given that the Law.gov project is discussing these same issues at its workshops and publishing the videos of those workshops free of charge on the Web, and given that these issues were discussed at the 2010 Princeton Open Government Workshop, video proceedings of which have been published free of charge on the Web by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, limiting access to the Williamsburg conference proceedings in this way seems problematic.

What do you think? Is it worthwhile trying to persuade the conference organizers to make the conference video available free of charge on the Web?

Thanks for considering this.