They are federal government documents and by definition they are public domain. As a result, this isn't at all about copyright or intellectual property. You can pull the stuff down off of West's database, cite it, copy it, give it to your friends, even use their page numbers in your database, and there's not a thing they can do (they know, they've tried).

The problem that is faced with legislative history is that there is so much of it, it is not recorded in an order that is useful for anyone working with it, and it's not searchable. West does have a pretty good system for finding information that's not in any particular order and linking it to other information that might be useful.

Would it be better if the National Archives, the GAO or someone put together its own annotated, indexed, searchable database of federal laws, important cases interpreting them and pertinent legislative history? Yep. I wish they would. But that would be spending tax dollars to benefit lawyers. See how that would fly. Unfortunately it isn't cheap to do and only a few outfits (West and Lexis predominantly) do it. My theory is that "exclusive" means that the GAO won't cut the same deal with Lexis.

Aw, it's not that big a deal. As Justice Scalia showed today, you don't need legislative history or even precedent. All you need are some old dictionaries, a bunch of quotes taken out of context, and the ability to ignore half of the second amendment.

While this is sweet, it immediately got my patent agent/soon-to-be patent lawyer mind got rolling. It's probably novel, useful and nonobvious, but if you're going to the trouble to propose marriage via patent application, at least you'd write some cleaner claims.