5 ms·

Keeping “Free Law” Free

68 points by thinkcomp 9y ago

syzygetic 9y ago
Very interesting topic, hadn't ever considered the possibility that the availability of legal proceedings / documents might be something other than a taxpayer-subsidized venture. It sure seems like that's the appropriate source for funds to accomplish this.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  When I heard abut this the first time I also was surprised that this stuff is not available for free. In a country governed by laws it should be one of the most important things that the law is easily accessible to all people.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > one of the most important things that the law is easily accessible to all people As rayiner points out [1], court filings are not case law. Decisions, the only component of a court's output that can properly be considered law, are generally freely and publicly available. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16230803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16230803
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      That's fine. I still think that if openness is a good thing then the legal system should be one of the first places. Everything should go into a central and open database.
      - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
        > I still think that if openness is a good thing then the legal system should be one of the first places And I would tend to agree with you. But make that argument, not something about the laws of the land being locked away. The “free law” pitch comes across as dishonest to anyone remotely familiar with the system.
      - arcbyte 9y ago
        I mean, they do already. The database is just the court records and you can go to the courthouse and access them. That's how its been for centuries.
        maxxxxx 9y ago
        I think it's time to take the records online.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - rocqua 9y ago
      Another reply claimed that it occurs that decisions are wrongly tagged and thus accidentally not available for free: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16231087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16231087
      - thinkcomp 9y ago
        See "District Court Opinions that Remain Hidden Despite a Longstanding Congressional Mandate of Transparency – The Result of Judicial Autonomy and Systemic Indifference" by Peter Martin at Cornell. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3034399 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3034399
piker 9y ago
This change makes a ton of sense if RECAP wants to make these documents accessible. Aggregate the data and make it easy for wholesale users. Soon enough, numerous sites/services will crop up, likely funded by ads, subscription fees or non-profit status, competing on usability for retail consumers. That will drive down profits and promote UI development and curation. Compare, e.g., ERISA and EDGAR data.
- bedelman 9y ago
  I'm the author of the article linked at the start of the thread. Replying to try to focus the discussion on the specific change I was writing about. Piker, can you say more about how "the change" make the documents "accessible" (or more accessible)? They were already at Internet Archive just fine. Several sites already copied the documents from IA and added their own presentation, cross-linking, notifications, and other services on top. I don't see the proposed changes as helping with this. Indeed, by sending the latest data only to CourtListener but not to IA, the proposed changes stand in the way of the other sites and services you envision -- as it seems they'll now have to license the data from FLP/CL (on a paid basis), rather than get it free directly from IA. These are the general concerns I was trying to present in my article.
  - piker 9y ago
    >> FLP also proposed to upload litigation materials to IA in only machine-readable formats compressed into enormous multi-gigabyte tarballs, ending the human-readable individual HTML files that have for years made it easy for normal users with standard web browsers to see court records. Perhaps the "only" is telling here. Were they previously also uploading the tarballs? No wholesale user would want to scrape the thousands of extra pages of HTML to download the content. So if they weren't already uploading the tarballs, this is actually a beneficial change.
    - bedelman 9y ago
      Previously FLP was uploading files that users can read with a web browser -- HTML, PDF, and also XML with metadata. I could and did link directly to HTML and PDFs, including circulating these materials with coauthors and research assistants and members of the press. If FLP begins uploading only huge tarballs, and not the individual constituent files, I won't be able to do any of that.
walterbell 9y ago
https://www.aallnet.org/Blogs/spectrum-blog/45407.html https://www.aallnet.org/Blogs/spectrum-blog/45407.html ”In 2008, computers at the Library for the U.S. Courts of the Seventh Circuit in Chicago provided free access to PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), which normally cost eight cents per page. Swartz loaded a script onto a library computer, which automatically downloaded PACER records every three seconds and uploaded them to a cloud server. Over a couple of weeks, he downloaded about 20% of the PACER database. [Aaron] Swartz provided the PACER documents to Public.Resource.Org. The FBI's investigation of this incident eventually ended without charges. Swartz continued to promote free public access to PACER documents by working with RECAP and PlainSite.”
- crankylinuxuser 9y ago
  Do note, with PACER, making a search counts as a page. So does clicking on the second page of results - another page. So does clicking the print button. Another page.
rayiner 9y ago
The misleading thing about the “free law” angle is that PACER does not record “the law.” It’s a system for accessing parties’ legal filings. Opinions rendered by courts, which are “law” are generally posted on the courts’ websites: http://www.nysb.uscourts.gov/judges-info/opinions http://www.nysb.uscourts.gov/judges-info/opinions. PACER is a service that’s primarily used by litigants that’s value is primarily to litigants. Litigants who need PACER access but can’t afford it are given free access. It’s not unreasonable for the government to charge a user fee to access it, like all the other kinds of user fees the government charges for public services. (Indeed, the government charges substantial filing fees for availing oneself of the courts in the first place.)
- AskewEgret 9y ago
  This cannot be emphasized enough. Accessing PACER from a courthouse is free. Accessing PACER for a case you are involved in is free. Getting judicial opinions from PACER is free. If you convince a judge that the cost of PACER is a burden to you, it is free. And finally, PACER doesn't actually charge you anything until you owe them more than $15 in a 3-month period - it is not cumulative: if your balance is less than $15, it goes to 0.
  - thinkcomp 9y ago
    This is true, but on the other hand, anyone who has ever been involved in litigation knows that it takes about one day to exceed 150 pages ($15) worth of documents in legal research.
  - nkw 9y ago
    > Accessing PACER from a courthouse is free. ... other than the half day you had to take off work, transportation to the courthouse and fees for printing out an electronic document -- and that is if you are local. What if I want to get a 'free' document in a court that is 2,000 miles away? > Accessing PACER for a case you are involved in is free. This is false. If you are an ECF user you theoretically can get "one free view" of a document as they are filed in a case you are a party, however this rarely works so you end up having to pay the pacer fee anyway. You still have to pay PACER fees anytime you view the docket, search, or view any document in a "case you are involved in". > Getting judicial opinions from PACER is free. ... a relative recent development and only covers some opinions. > If you convince a judge that the cost of PACER is a burden to you, it is free. Really? You have a citation for that? I'm sure I can convince at least one federal judge my several thousand dollar a month pacer bill is a burden. That would be great.
morisy 9y ago
> One, I don’t know that RECAP’s expenses need to be particularly high. Open source software development often does not entail paying developers anything at all. It's incredibly hard to run an open source project like this with zero paid developers. I've done it! And others have too, but it's nearly impossible to pull off in the long term and having paid staff with some kind of recurring revenue is almost essential to keeping these kinds of projects alive and growing. Sure, you can launch that kind of project and run it for a few years, but over time you have customer support queries to deal with, obnoxious bugs that take hours to ferret out, uptime and DevOps challenges that will ultimately otherwise fall under one volunteer who, if unpaid, has a day job and outside commitments and gets sick or bored or run down. > With the right motivation including public praise, some people may be inclined to donate their skills. Certainly RECAP needs new features and improvements from time to time, but most such improvements should last indefinitely once built, reducing RECAP’s ongoing expenses. What's the model here for having an organization with zero expenses run this kind of broad-based public good? It's very easy to underestimate what it takes projects like RECAP to operate, or to think that open source contributions can bring costs close to zero, but the reality is that these projects are very hard to keep running on the cheap, which is why we keep seeing small projects — even when that get a lot of praise and acclaim — shutter. And relatively speaking, RECAP is an incredibly cheap project already: It's got one full-time staffer, and in 2016 its expenses were under $100,000: https://free.law/pdf/taxes/2016-990-EZ.pdf https://free.law/pdf/taxes/2016-990-EZ.pdf RECAP is still making its data broadly accessible for free, while also trying to find some kind of sustainability model beyond a hope and a prayer. Donations and grants come and go, and while open source contributions can be helpful they can almost never keep a centralized service like this running for the long-term.
- morisy 9y ago
  To follow up, look at percentage of contributions to CourListener from just one individual vs. other volunteers: https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener/graphs/contributors https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener/graphs/contr... "The community will keep it running for free" sounds great until you've actually tried managing that community.
- thinkcomp 9y ago

68 points by thinkcomp 9y ago

Very interesting topic, hadn't ever considered the possibility that the availability of legal proceedings / documents might be something other than a taxpayer-subsidized venture. It sure seems like that's the appropriate source for funds to accomplish this.

maxxxxx 9y ago
When I heard abut this the first time I also was surprised that this stuff is not available for free. In a country governed by laws it should be one of the most important things that the law is easily accessible to all people.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > one of the most important things that the law is easily accessible to all people As rayiner points out [1], court filings are not case law. Decisions, the only component of a court's output that can properly be considered law, are generally freely and publicly available. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16230803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16230803
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    That's fine. I still think that if openness is a good thing then the legal system should be one of the first places. Everything should go into a central and open database.
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      > I still think that if openness is a good thing then the legal system should be one of the first places And I would tend to agree with you. But make that argument, not something about the laws of the land being locked away. The “free law” pitch comes across as dishonest to anyone remotely familiar with the system.
    - arcbyte 9y ago
      I mean, they do already. The database is just the court records and you can go to the courthouse and access them. That's how its been for centuries.
      - maxxxxx 9y ago
        I think it's time to take the records online.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - rocqua 9y ago
    Another reply claimed that it occurs that decisions are wrongly tagged and thus accidentally not available for free: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16231087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16231087
    - thinkcomp 9y ago
      See "District Court Opinions that Remain Hidden Despite a Longstanding Congressional Mandate of Transparency – The Result of Judicial Autonomy and Systemic Indifference" by Peter Martin at Cornell. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3034399 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3034399

piker 9y ago

This change makes a ton of sense if RECAP wants to make these documents accessible. Aggregate the data and make it easy for wholesale users. Soon enough, numerous sites/services will crop up, likely funded by ads, subscription fees or non-profit status, competing on usability for retail consumers. That will drive down profits and promote UI development and curation. Compare, e.g., ERISA and EDGAR data.

bedelman 9y ago
I'm the author of the article linked at the start of the thread. Replying to try to focus the discussion on the specific change I was writing about. Piker, can you say more about how "the change" make the documents "accessible" (or more accessible)? They were already at Internet Archive just fine. Several sites already copied the documents from IA and added their own presentation, cross-linking, notifications, and other services on top. I don't see the proposed changes as helping with this. Indeed, by sending the latest data only to CourtListener but not to IA, the proposed changes stand in the way of the other sites and services you envision -- as it seems they'll now have to license the data from FLP/CL (on a paid basis), rather than get it free directly from IA. These are the general concerns I was trying to present in my article.
- piker 9y ago
  >> FLP also proposed to upload litigation materials to IA in only machine-readable formats compressed into enormous multi-gigabyte tarballs, ending the human-readable individual HTML files that have for years made it easy for normal users with standard web browsers to see court records. Perhaps the "only" is telling here. Were they previously also uploading the tarballs? No wholesale user would want to scrape the thousands of extra pages of HTML to download the content. So if they weren't already uploading the tarballs, this is actually a beneficial change.
  - bedelman 9y ago
    Previously FLP was uploading files that users can read with a web browser -- HTML, PDF, and also XML with metadata. I could and did link directly to HTML and PDFs, including circulating these materials with coauthors and research assistants and members of the press. If FLP begins uploading only huge tarballs, and not the individual constituent files, I won't be able to do any of that.

walterbell 9y ago

https://www.aallnet.org/Blogs/spectrum-blog/45407.html https://www.aallnet.org/Blogs/spectrum-blog/45407.html ”In 2008, computers at the Library for the U.S. Courts of the Seventh Circuit in Chicago provided free access to PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), which normally cost eight cents per page. Swartz loaded a script onto a library computer, which automatically downloaded PACER records every three seconds and uploaded them to a cloud server. Over a couple of weeks, he downloaded about 20% of the PACER database. [Aaron] Swartz provided the PACER documents to Public.Resource.Org. The FBI's investigation of this incident eventually ended without charges. Swartz continued to promote free public access to PACER documents by working with RECAP and PlainSite.”

crankylinuxuser 9y ago
Do note, with PACER, making a search counts as a page. So does clicking on the second page of results - another page. So does clicking the print button. Another page.

rayiner 9y ago

The misleading thing about the “free law” angle is that PACER does not record “the law.” It’s a system for accessing parties’ legal filings. Opinions rendered by courts, which are “law” are generally posted on the courts’ websites: http://www.nysb.uscourts.gov/judges-info/opinions http://www.nysb.uscourts.gov/judges-info/opinions. PACER is a service that’s primarily used by litigants that’s value is primarily to litigants. Litigants who need PACER access but can’t afford it are given free access. It’s not unreasonable for the government to charge a user fee to access it, like all the other kinds of user fees the government charges for public services. (Indeed, the government charges substantial filing fees for availing oneself of the courts in the first place.)

AskewEgret 9y ago
This cannot be emphasized enough. Accessing PACER from a courthouse is free. Accessing PACER for a case you are involved in is free. Getting judicial opinions from PACER is free. If you convince a judge that the cost of PACER is a burden to you, it is free. And finally, PACER doesn't actually charge you anything until you owe them more than $15 in a 3-month period - it is not cumulative: if your balance is less than $15, it goes to 0.
- thinkcomp 9y ago
  This is true, but on the other hand, anyone who has ever been involved in litigation knows that it takes about one day to exceed 150 pages ($15) worth of documents in legal research.
- nkw 9y ago
  > Accessing PACER from a courthouse is free. ... other than the half day you had to take off work, transportation to the courthouse and fees for printing out an electronic document -- and that is if you are local. What if I want to get a 'free' document in a court that is 2,000 miles away? > Accessing PACER for a case you are involved in is free. This is false. If you are an ECF user you theoretically can get "one free view" of a document as they are filed in a case you are a party, however this rarely works so you end up having to pay the pacer fee anyway. You still have to pay PACER fees anytime you view the docket, search, or view any document in a "case you are involved in". > Getting judicial opinions from PACER is free. ... a relative recent development and only covers some opinions. > If you convince a judge that the cost of PACER is a burden to you, it is free. Really? You have a citation for that? I'm sure I can convince at least one federal judge my several thousand dollar a month pacer bill is a burden. That would be great.

morisy 9y ago

> One, I don’t know that RECAP’s expenses need to be particularly high. Open source software development often does not entail paying developers anything at all. It's incredibly hard to run an open source project like this with zero paid developers. I've done it! And others have too, but it's nearly impossible to pull off in the long term and having paid staff with some kind of recurring revenue is almost essential to keeping these kinds of projects alive and growing. Sure, you can launch that kind of project and run it for a few years, but over time you have customer support queries to deal with, obnoxious bugs that take hours to ferret out, uptime and DevOps challenges that will ultimately otherwise fall under one volunteer who, if unpaid, has a day job and outside commitments and gets sick or bored or run down. > With the right motivation including public praise, some people may be inclined to donate their skills. Certainly RECAP needs new features and improvements from time to time, but most such improvements should last indefinitely once built, reducing RECAP’s ongoing expenses. What's the model here for having an organization with zero expenses run this kind of broad-based public good? It's very easy to underestimate what it takes projects like RECAP to operate, or to think that open source contributions can bring costs close to zero, but the reality is that these projects are very hard to keep running on the cheap, which is why we keep seeing small projects — even when that get a lot of praise and acclaim — shutter. And relatively speaking, RECAP is an incredibly cheap project already: It's got one full-time staffer, and in 2016 its expenses were under $100,000: https://free.law/pdf/taxes/2016-990-EZ.pdf https://free.law/pdf/taxes/2016-990-EZ.pdf RECAP is still making its data broadly accessible for free, while also trying to find some kind of sustainability model beyond a hope and a prayer. Donations and grants come and go, and while open source contributions can be helpful they can almost never keep a centralized service like this running for the long-term.

morisy 9y ago
To follow up, look at percentage of contributions to CourListener from just one individual vs. other volunteers: https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener/graphs/contributors https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener/graphs/contr... "The community will keep it running for free" sounds great until you've actually tried managing that community.
thinkcomp 9y ago