Carl Malamud’s quixotic mission to free government information took a step closer to reality on Wednesday morning when he struck a deal with Fastcase to electronically publish a free archive of federal case law.

Mr. Malamud, an Internet radio pioneer who set up public.resource.org in March with the idea of making “public works” accessible via the Internet, wants to force the federal government to make information more widely available.

In August he began using optical scanning technology to copy decisions that have been generally available only on paper in law libraries or via subscription from the Thomson West unit of the Canadian publishing conglomerate Thomson and from LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier, based in London.

The two companies now dominate the $5 billion legal publishing market.

However, Fastcase, a smaller player based in Washington, D.C., decided that Mr. Malamud’s idea had merit. The company has provided him with its database of federal case law from 1950 to the present and the earliest Supreme Court decisions. Fastcase and public.resource.org have placed the archive in the public domain.

The archive includes 1.8 million pages of federal case law. Ed Walters, the chief executive of Fastcase said that the contribution was a way for the company to expand its reach beyond lawyers and make legal information available to the general public.

“I said I would put all federal case law on line and this is a huge chunk,” said Mr. Malamud.

Still missing are the Federal district court filings, but he said that volunteers are now beginning to place current legal decisions online on sites like Altlaw.

“It’s not LexisNexis, but the raw data is there,” he said.