Carl Malamud is doing his best to make historical court decisions visible online.  This is inspirational - it took a huge fight for the online publishers to give up on controlling ownership of citations to page numbers in court decisions.

As the comments to this Tim O'Reilly post make clear, there are several places online where current court decisions are publicly available.  I frequently go to the Cornell Legal Information Institute.  But the historical data is hard to get to.

Another admirable effort of Carl's is getting Congressional hearings online.  (Plus, any opportunity to tell people about the Internet Archive is a good thing, so follow the link.):

There is a concrete, funded set of initiatives to finish the wiring of the [Congressional hearing] rooms so that all hearings have video coverage, and it is clear from a technical point of view that it is possible to achieve the goal of broadcast-quality video for download on the Internet by the end of the 110th congress. The recommendation to adopt that goal is currently awaiting action from the Office of the Speaker and the Chairman of the Committee on House Administration.

Go, Carl.

Routing around traditional publishers who want to create friction (or barriers to entry) for online access to data isn't easy.  This is the same extended tussle that ScienceCommons.org is engaged in.  In the end, the gatekeepers should lose, particularly where the public benefits so far outweigh the private returns to the publishers.  A cure for Parkinson's, made possible because scientists can easily share data across disease silos, or another royalty for Reed Elsevier?  You be the judge.