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FWIW: We offered many years ago to pay PACER and various states to do precisely that (move to digital publishing, and make it all open). They were all unwillin

FWIW: We offered many years ago to pay PACER and various states to do precisely that (move to digital publishing, and make it all open). They were all unwilling. PACER is at least somewhat reasonable, since we did not offer to pay them the 145 million a year they were making at the time, and they felt Congress would kill them if they gave up that revenue source, which is probably not wrong. (the others, what we offered was much more than they were making). So I'm not sure why you have such hope. For all states hat have moved to digital first publishing, just about all of them have struck agreements with lexis/etc whereby they have token "free access" sites and the data is still otherwise locked up.

JackC 8y ago
> I'm not sure why you have such hope. Hey, I work at the Library Innovation Lab -- being hopeful about open access scenarios is just one of the services I provide. :) But basically I'm hopeful in this instance because (a) there's less and less incentive for commercial publishers to try to control this particular low-bandwidth stream of public domain text; (b) there's more and more platforms that would benefit from a standard open feed; and (c) the courts have had a lot more time to think about it (in the grand scheme of how old courts are vs. how old the internet is) and see other courts try it first. On that last point, we have a dozen or so state supreme courts already using another service of ours, Perma.cc, so we do have some idea how they think about adopting new technology. Would love to chat more with you or anyone else who's been thinking about how to crack this -- your experience sounds really interesting, and "hopeful" doesn't mean I think it'll be easy. Contact info is in my profile.