Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Conversation on anonymization of court judgments

[Anonymous]
 So why do you spoil invade people's privacy. I don't mind law students reading about my case but it comes up when anyone googles my name. I've won the case but I just want it private. Why can't you remove it. What do you gain by harassing people who have done you no harm!

[Sushant]

 If you have read the blog, you would know that court judgments are in public domain. Courts have done it for a reason as judgments are precedents and open for people to read and scrutinize.

Courts are for common people as well. Not just lawyers or law students.

Court judgments are published by the Court Registrar. I as a legal information provider only re-publish it. And there is no copyright violation there because court judgments don't have copyright.

Hope that helps.

[Anonymous]

 You don't get it do you Sushant? You are giving me your stock answer...of course court judgements are public. The point is that anyone who googles my name will only see that there "some kind of court case". Nobody will read the detail and although I've done nothing wrong. [snipped]. I will still be maligned. You need to do this more intelligently and sensitively so that public get info without maligning people. You seem intelligent enough but where is your EQ?

[Sushant]

 Sorry can't assume myself that smart to take over people's ability to comprehend. That kind of selective filtering very much defeats the purpose of opening up Indian law that I did using Indian Kanoon.

[Anonymous]
What you mean is that you want to take the easy way out and you cant or wont create a site which gives people what they want without invading their privacy. You then hide behind patriotism which I see continues to be the last refuge of scoundrels. Grow up and see the damage you are causing straightforward innocent people..

Sunday, June 3, 2012

[Un]blocking of indiankanoon.org by judis

To: amishra@nic.in, dash@nic.in

Dear Dr. Shefali and Mrs. Alka,

I am the founder of the website indiankanoon.org that provides free
access to Indian court judgments and state-of-art search facility on
indian legal documents. Many people rely on indiankanoon.org for
retrieving court judgments relevant to their case. More than 10 lakh
people use indiankanoon in just one month.

I just found out that the IP address of indiankanoon.org (208.79.211.6)
is currently blocked by judis.nic.in As a result indiankanoon is not
able to get the new judgments.

IndianKanoon downloads judgments from judis daily at 00:00 am so that
there is no impact to the users of judis. If judis.nic.in is getting
overloaded because of IndianKanoon then I will be happy to follow any
directions given by you. I will reduce the crawling speed myself if you
unblock it immediately.

Hope to hear from you soon,

Thanks,
Sushant.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Karnataka High Court: Problems with the poor quality of uploaded judgments

To Karnataka High Court,

I run a website called Indian Kanoon http://indiankanoon.org that aggregates judgments from Supreme Court as well as all high courts. It extracts text from all judgments and provides a free state-of-art search functionality.

Currently judgments provided by Karnataka High Court on the website http://www.karnatakajudiciary.kar.nic.in/ are scanned copies of printed text. The image quality is so bad that it is hard to extract any text from these judgments and are often unreadable. Considering Karnataka High Court serves a very critical role in Indian democracy and many judgments have very far reaching consequences, such technical problem has created a huge roadblock in people looking into High Court judgments.

It is not possible for people trying to search Karnataka High Court judgments by keywords as many people will need to identify cases of interest. A technology impediment makes searching almost impossible for Karnataka High Court judgments, where we know how much people today rely on search to identify relevant material.

This email is mainly to highlight the poor quality of uploaded judgments that is inhibiting a large section of people from accessing the law of the land. It would be better if judgments are uploaded in text format or the PDF files are created from text (and not from images as currently being done).

I wish and hope that this complaint will be looked into and the technical problem will be quickly solved. I would be very happy to help Karnataka High Court if it needs any technical advice in uploading the judgments.

Thanks,
Sushant Sinha.
 
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