> It's not "rent seeking" to build a value-added service on top of publicly available information, or even to charge for making obscure publicly available information more easily available.
I'm inclined to agree. But perhaps "rent seeking" or not is not the right debate.
It's hard to tease out how much of the value of WL/Lexis/BL is in comprehensive access to cases and documents vs. how much comes from the kind of value added products/services that you mention.
An interesting question is just how valuable these value added services actually are. Whatever value they provide today might reasonably be discounted by their lack of defensibility going forward. As you noted, there is much room for technological disruption here. One could imagine dramatically better products (my thesis is that the right Silicon Valley startup can build them). If WL/Lexis/BL want to survive in the next 5-10 years, they are going to have to get away from publishing and push technology farther, either internally or by acquiring the very few startups who are doing interesting things in this space. What do you make of that thesis? It sounds to me like your thinking about their value add might be clarified by distinguishing between publishing and technology.
> It's hard to tease out how much of the value of WL/Lexis/BL is in comprehensive access to cases and documents vs. how much comes from the kind of value added products/services that you mention.
Providing comprehensive access to disparate publicly available information is itself a value-add. Should courts submit their opinions to some sort of centralized system instead of posting a link to the PDF on their website? Sure, you can make that argument. But it's hard to say that courts are remiss in not doing so, considering that they are dozens of independent entities. Moreover, someone has to pay to build that system. Categorizing information is not free--Google just makes us think it's free because it charges us by selling our privacy rather than simply asking for a fee. Now it's certainly something that could be done at the public expense, and maybe it should be. But until then, providing comprehensive access to these documents is a value-add.
> One could imagine dramatically better products (my thesis is that the right Silicon Valley startup can build them). If WL/Lexis/BL want to survive in the next 5-10 years, they are going to have to get away from publishing and push technology farther
I can imagine dramatically better products, but not in the next 5-10 years. If history tells us anything,[1] it's that AI is really hard and any technology that relies on advances in AI are further off than we imagine. Google's search engine, at the moment, can't even tell the difference between a real product review site and SEO-optimized, auto-generated garbage. It'll be a lot longer than 5-10 years before I trust some algorithm to tell me whether one case cites another in a positive or negative light.
There are other business models. Westlaw / Lexis Nexus's customers and competitors who do not have this curated information, can get together (via an intermediary perhaps) to curate them better.
I'm inclined to agree. But perhaps "rent seeking" or not is not the right debate.
It's hard to tease out how much of the value of WL/Lexis/BL is in comprehensive access to cases and documents vs. how much comes from the kind of value added products/services that you mention.
An interesting question is just how valuable these value added services actually are. Whatever value they provide today might reasonably be discounted by their lack of defensibility going forward. As you noted, there is much room for technological disruption here. One could imagine dramatically better products (my thesis is that the right Silicon Valley startup can build them). If WL/Lexis/BL want to survive in the next 5-10 years, they are going to have to get away from publishing and push technology farther, either internally or by acquiring the very few startups who are doing interesting things in this space. What do you make of that thesis? It sounds to me like your thinking about their value add might be clarified by distinguishing between publishing and technology.