Fascinating reading from the Legal Information Institute on the dynamics of trying to offer free digital legal content. Some choice quotes:

"As is often true at points of dramatic change, those least well served by the old regime can more readily see and seize the full advantages of the new."

"Too many public law-making bodies that have undertaken digital distribution of law data have done so without any thought to facilitating redistribution with added value. Distributing only in PDF is a telltale sign. PDF is not friendly to subsequent machine processing. Those who want a court opinion to "look like a court opinion" on the screen or upon being sent to a laser printer are fond of the format. But for those who would link the references within a document to the cited material, add key words and other metadata, create sophisticated full-text indices, and integrate its content with other related law materials PDF is a major barrier."

"Subtler barriers lie in format changes and inconsistencies produced by simple inattention. Bodies that exercise great care to assure the quality and consistency of their output in print can wreak havoc on the data systems of others that build on their opinions, enactments, or rules because they will release data that will print handsomely on a page but be utterly confusing to text processing software or search engine."

"Like these peers and others putting law content on the Net, the LII has encountered a vastly larger and more diverse audience for legal materials than the commercial publishers and on-line providers previously perceived or dealt with. Often, it is an audience that is highly sophisticated in its needs even though it is not an audience of lawyers; professionals of all kinds in many countries make use of legal information. This new and important audience is largely ignorant of the idiosyncrasies of legal research and is, in effect, asking why legal research can't be done in ways that are closer to other forms of on-line research. It is a good question, and while there are doubtless sound reasons why legal research must be different there is also little doubt that a commercial duopoly serving an all-lawyer audience had little reason to innovate or to make things easier for non-professional -- and hence they did not. "

http://www.law.cornell.edu/working-papers/open/martin/free.html

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