LRR: China frolic

[Frank Bennett <biercenator@gmail.com>]

Dear all,

A few progress notes on the Legal Resource Registry.

    http://fbennett.github.io/legal-resource-registry/index.html

Chet circulated a note earlier about licensing issues, etc., the gist
being that we should take care to avoid licensing hang-ups and
hold-outs in respect of externally developed tools and content. I
noted that the externally-contributed content consists of factual
lists of court names, which are not subject to copyright. I also said
the repo as a whole would be under CC0 (public domain). I spoke
without checking: in fact the repo already carries a permissive BSD
license:

    https://github.com/fbennett/legal-resource-registry/blob/master/LICENSE

I won't ordinarily be tapping individual contributors to post waiver
notices to the OASIS mailing list (suggested by both Monica and Chet).
To the extent that people are posting spelling corrections and lists
of courts, the content is not subject to copyright in the first place.
As I responded to Chet, I don't see a problem, but I understand that
others might take a different view. I leave the decision on whether to
adopt the LRR identifiers in the hands of the TC.

This weekend, I had occasion to extend the content a bit, with the
addition of an entry for the PRC. It's pretty massive - we now have
identifiers for every court in the country, down to the trial court
level. Feel free to take a trawl through the entries: they may be
monotonous, but there are a lot of them. :-)

I'll be working to get MLZ and its data-collection site translators
working with the new LRR identifier schema in the coming weeks. While
not directly relevant to OASIS LegalCiteM, experience so far has shown
that valuable lessons can arise from putting a schema to work in the
wild.

Enjoy.

Frank