Friday, May 2, 2014

Captcha on Patna high court website

To: hcpat-bih@nic.in

I am founder of a legal search engine called Indian Kanoon (http://indiankanoon.org)
Indian Kanoon provides state of art free search and free access to
Indian court judgments to the common people.

Indian Kanoon daily crawls different Indian court websites and adds the
set of updated judgments for Supreme court and high courts to its
database. Since court judgments do not have copyright protection,
Indian Kanoon does not violate any copyright law.

Infact Indian Kanoon provides just another portal for people to get access to
court judgments and thereby allows more widespread distribution of court
judgments. Restricting access to judgments in this particular fashion
will hinder Indian Kanoon ability to provide access to Patna High
Court decisions and thereby in people to have easy access to court
judgments. Currently Indian Kanoon serves more than 2 million users
every month.

Indian Kanoon fills in many voids which exist in current Indian court
websites. Restricting access to judgments also forces people to stay
with the court websites and force them to not use the law search tools
provided by other providers like Indian Kanoon. I think providing
unhindered access to court judgments is in the interest of Indian people
as they can use any research tools provided by any competitive portal.
If such restrictions are removed, people can choose whichever website
they like most.

If the problem was in Patna High Court server getting overload because of
Indian Kanoon crawling, I would like to state that Indian Kanoon crawls
the websit eonly once at 12:00 AM IST when there is little chance of
affecting any normal user on your website. Further, replicating court
judgments on Indian Kanoon reduces the load on Patna court servers
as many people can access the judgments directly on Indian Kanoon.

So I would kindly  request you to remove captcha restriction on Patna High
Court website.

Your's Sincerely,
Sushant.