Did he have any idea of how the Texas Legislature plans to enact such a change to the open documents laws and exactly what he would be proposing? There will be a bigger issue to be resolved if Texas enacts a prohibition on any records of a Texas citizen being published on the internet (and I'm suprised this legal challenge hasn't happend in Califorina yet regarding public documents that can be copied and retrieved at the county courthouse).
It may be a violation of the United States Constitution's Section 8 provision that only Congress' has the ability to regulate interstate commerce, to deny bulk release of digital documentation from the county level. I wouldn't be surprised to see an alliance of the national bank chains (JP Morgan Chase, Alliance, First National, Wells Fargo, etc...) and the larger national title companies that have an internet documentation interest (TransUnion, GatorSearch, etc...) and an internet interface for entering search information and uploading document images, filing a suit in Federal District court to have the portion of the law blocked, if it is not very narrowly constued, as it may prevent them from recieving digital images of documents from Texas.
My point in all of this is, you may be able convince the Texas Legislature to enact a provision barring the counties from publishing the documents on their own web sites. However, I don't think you can enact a provision barring a private citizen or corporation from placing the public documents on the internet for business purposes. So long as there is full access and the documents can be requested (in any format), there will be no way to prevent this information from making it's way onto the internet.
Charles W. Skinner
National Vendor Management
Consumer Marketing Services, Inc.
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