Groklaw

» see groklaw.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

in 2003 i was starting university and groklaw was a paralegal in the united states reading american court filings so that nobody else had to. i knew the name the way you know a name from links, which is not the same as having followed it. the case it existed for was genuinely frightening at the time, and if you were installing linux anywhere near a company in those years you had heard the outline of it.

the outline: the sco group sued ibm in march 2003, claimed that unix code it owned had been copied into linux, and started telling companies that running linux would require paying sco a license fee. it was a claim about the ownership of the ground everything else was standing on. the trade press covered it as a headline generator, mostly by reprinting whatever sco's lawyers said that week.

pamela jones opened groklaw on 16 may 2003 and did the opposite. she read the documents. readers who lived near the relevant courthouses went and fetched filings, and other readers typed them out of pdf into searchable text. jones then wrote up what each one meant in ordinary language. within a year the site was where you went if you wanted to know what was actually in the case rather than what someone's press office had claimed.

it ran that way for a decade and won the sort of awards that are given to public services. the free software foundation named it a project of social benefit in 2008, and the eff handed jones a pioneer award in 2010. then in august 2013 it ended in a way nobody had prepared for.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually did ~

the method was unglamorous and it is why the site mattered. court records in the united states were technically public and practically unreadable, sitting behind a paywalled federal system in scanned documents that no search engine could index. groklaw turned them into text on the open web with dates attached.

that made two things possible at once. anyone could check a claim against the document instead of against a summary of it, and the volunteers reading along could recognize things the reporters missed, since a lot of them had been working with unix since before sco existed. the case eventually went sco's way exactly never, and the archive of how that happened was assembled almost entirely by people doing it in the evenings.

~ the last post ~

lavabit shut itself down on 8 august 2013 rather than hand over what a us court had demanded, and its founder said publicly that he had stopped using email and that anyone who knew what he knew would stop too. twelve days later jones published an article called forced exposure and closed the site.

her argument was narrow and hard to answer. groklaw was built out of strangers sending her documents and tips, some of them from people with jobs to lose, and the entire pipeline ran on email. she wrote that there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate. without that channel the work could not be done honestly, so she would not pretend otherwise and carry on.

~ what happened to the address ~

the archive stayed up for years afterward, static, with the comments closed. it remained the most complete account of one of the longest running fights in software licensing, which is not a small thing to leave behind.

then the domain went the way domains go. groklaw.net now points at a cryptocurrency gambling site, which is a fittingly stupid ending for ten years of transcribed court records. the material itself survives in the internet archive, unindexed by anything most people would think to search. a site that existed to make the public record findable is now a thing you have to know about in advance in order to find.

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