More than five years ago, I spoke at CITP about the US Federal Courts electronic access system called PACER. I noted that despite centuries of precedent stating that the public should have access to the law as openly and freely as possible, the courts were charging unreasonable rates for access to the public record. As […]
Two Major updates to RECAP: Developers from Around the World Write Code in Memory of Aaron Swartz
April 2, 2013 by
A little over two months ago, we joined with the Think Computer Foundation to offer a set of grants in memory of our friend Aaron Swartz. Aaron worked on many issues in his too-short life, but one of those was liberating American court records from behind a pay-wall. He helped to inspire our RECAP project, […]
New Search and Browsing Interface for the RECAP Archive
August 3, 2010 by
We have written in the past about RECAP, our project to help make federal court documents more easily accessible. We continue to upgrade the system, and we are eager for your feedback on a new set of functionality.
One of the most-requested RECAP features is a better web interface to the archive. Today we’re releasing an experimental system for searching and browsing, at archive.recapthelaw.org. There are also a couple of extra features that we’re eager to get feedback on. For example, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for any case in order to get updates when new documents are added to the archive. We’ve also included some basic tagging features that lets anybody add tags to any case. We’re sure that there will be bugs to be fixed or improvements that can be made. Please let us know.
The first version of the system was built by an enterprising team of students in Professor Ed Felten’s “Civic Technologies” course: Jen King, Brett Lullo, Sajid Mehmood, and Daniel Mattos Roberts. Dhruv Kapadia has done many of the subsequent updates. The links from the Recap Archive pages point to files on our gracious host, the Internet Archive.
See, for example, the RECAP Archive page for United States of America v. Arizona, State of, et al. This is the Arizona District Court case in which the judge last week issued an order granting injunction against several portions of the controversial immigration law. As you can see, some of the documents have a “Download” link that allows you to directly download the document from the Internet Archive, whereas others have a “Buy from PACER” link because no RECAP users have yet liberated the document.
New York AG Files Antitrust Suit Against Intel
November 5, 2009 by
Yesterday, New York’s state Attorney General filed what could turn out to be a major antitrust suit against Intel. The suit accuses Intel of taking illegal steps to exclude a competitor, AMD, from the market.
All we have so far is the NYAG’s complaint, which tells one side of the case. Intel will have ample opportunity to respond, and the NYAG will ultimately have the burden of backing up its allegations with proof — so caution is in order at this point. Still, the complaint lays out the shape of the NYAG’s case.
The case concerns the market for x86-compatible microprocessors, which are the “brains” of most personal computers. Intel dominates this market but a rival company, AMD, has long been trying to build market share. The complaint offers a long narrative of Intel’s (and AMD’s) relationships with major PC makers (“OEMs”, in the jargon) such as Dell, HP, and IBM — the customers who buy x86 processors from Intel and AMD.
The crux of the case is the allegation that Intel paid OEMs to not buy from AMD. This is reminiscent of one aspect of the big Microsoft antitrust case of 1998, in which one of the DOJ’s claims was that Microsoft had paid people not to do business with Netscape.
I’ll leave it to the experts to debate the economic niceties, but as I understand it there is a distinction between paying someone to buy more of your product (e.g. giving a volume discount) as opposed to paying someone to buy less of your rival’s product. The former is generally fine, but if you have monopoly power the latter is suspect.
As the NYAG tells it, Intel tried to pretend the payments were for something else, but the participants knew what was really going on: that the payments would stop if an OEM started buying more from AMD. The evidence on this point could turn out to be important. Does the NYAG have “smoking gun” emails in which Intel made this explicit? Does the evidence show that OEMs understood the arrangement as the NYAG claims? I assume there’s a huge trove of email evidence that both sides will be digesting.
It will be interesting to watch this case develop. Thanks to tools like RECAP, many of the case documents will be available to the public. Stay tuned for more improvements to RECAP that will provide even better access.
