19 ms·

Finishing what Aaron Swartz started with PACER

202 points by thinkcomp 14y ago

fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
Another HN user kindly pointed out to me in a related thread that the Gov't has modified their terms to specifically prohibit the use of RECAP. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059847 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059847
- danielweber 14y ago
  That is incorrect based on PACER's own words. PACER has a free version, but the free version limits your ability to transfer to other bodies. Although I'm sure that gets people freaking out, that's hardly RECAP being "prohibited." But, really, even with a 100% populated RECAP, all lawyers use PACER for their real work. The fact that any joker in the world can upload documents to RECAP makes it unsuitable for anything you are going to put before a judge. RECAP is fine for bloggers, though.
  - thinkcomp 14y ago
    Huh? "any joker in the world can upload documents to RECAP makes it unsuitable for anything you are going to put before a judge" == FALSE For those documents that have been uploaded, RECAP's database contains bit for bit the same exact documents that are on PACER and nothing more. It's verified using an SHA1 hash. For example, see the document entries for http://ia700504.us.archive.org/29/items/gov.uscourts.mad.137971/gov.uscourts.mad.137971.docket.xml http://ia700504.us.archive.org/29/items/gov.uscourts.mad.137.... PACER does not provide hashes, but if you are worried that a document might have been compromised you can always download it from PACER and run the hash yourself.
    - daeken 14y ago
      How is that verified? Does PACER publish hashes or the like, so that RECAP can confirm that the documents are authentic? It seems pretty unlikely.
      - danielweber 14y ago
        He added to his comment to say that you can redownload all the documents from PACER to make sure none of them were altered. Which gets you absolutely nowhere. RECAP is the Wikipedia of law. Crowd-sourced, free, usually reliable -- but if you are relying on its accuracy as part of vigorously defending your client's interests to the best of your abilities, you have failed. EDIT: I think requiring PACER to provide SHA1 sums free-of-charge would probably be, on the whole, a good thing.
    - danielweber 14y ago
      https://www.recapthelaw.org/about/#authenticity https://www.recapthelaw.org/about/#authenticity "How do I know that the documents provided by RECAP are genuine? Unfortunately, you don’t. We rely on RECAP users to donate documents to the repository." I.e., any joker in the world can upload what they want to RECAP. It's a very useful service, but any actual lawyer relying on RECAP instead of paying pennies to get the documents from PACER is probably committing malpractice on his clients.
  - fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
    Here, in PACER's own words. http://www.pacer.gov/announcements/general/exemptnotice.html http://www.pacer.gov/announcements/general/exemptnotice.html "A fee exemption applies only for limited purposes. Any transfer of data obtained as the result of a fee exemption is prohibited unless expressly authorized by the court. Therefore, fee exempt PACER users must refrain from the use of RECAP. The prohibition on transfer of information received without fee is not intended to bar a quote or reference to information received as a result of a fee exemption in a scholarly or other similar work. "
    - danielweber 14y ago
      Yes, thank you for posting exactly what I said. If you take out the words and meaning of "fee exemption" you get something close to what you said.
      - fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
        It makes a slight problem for those who want to use RECAP in the manner suggested in OP's post.
    - thinkcomp 14y ago
      I discuss the court's ridiculous disclaimer here: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=85 http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=85
      - fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
        Oh, I agree that it is ridiculous, almost Monty Python ridiculous. I hope that you are successful, I will probably participate, and thank you for doing something. I think it is ridiculous for there to be any paywall for court information to start with. I hope that something like Veeck v SBCC will someday be applied. http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/293_F3d_791.htm http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/293_F3d_791.htm
    - esurc 14y ago
rayiner 14y ago
Much of this is quite uninformed, which makes me question the value of Mr. Foster's other points. > What other options are out there for accessing federal case law? Mr. Foster seems confused. PACER is a system for accessing court dockets, not a repository of case law. You can think of court docket's as a court's "inbox." When the parties file a complaint, motion, or brief, or when the judge issues an interlocutory order or other memorandum, it goes in the docket. Court dockets are mostly concerned with the mechanics of a single case--they are not intended to be a source of law. > Open government pioneer Carl Malamud says commercial ventures such as Lexis-Nexis, West Law, and Bloomberg Law compete for a $6.5 billion market built around extracting rents from this public commons: Mr. Foster completely mischaracterizes what Lexis and West do. These services do not charge you for access to the case law, which are in the public domain. What they do is provide a value-added service on top of the publicly available case law. They have armies of legally-trained professionals who read cases as they come out and annotate them with "head notes" which give summaries of the case and index the case into Lexis's or West's legal ontology. E.g. if I'm thinking of using a case to support a proposition, I can log on to West Law and have it give me a report of all the cases that cite that one. The report not only gives me a simple "citation list" like you can get with Google scholar, but a summary of the contexts in which each case was cited, whether it was referenced in a positive or negative light, and how extensively it was discussed. They can do this because they have (expensive) human readers who go through the cases to generate this meta-data.[1] This is not "extracting rents from the public commons." This is charging for the valuable service of organizing and summarizing publicly available information. There are legitimate complaints about access to case law. While all federal courts that I'm aware of freely post their opinions on their websites (e.g. http://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/recentop/week/recprec.htm http://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/recentop/week/recprec.htm), the same isn't true for all state courts. But as a practical matter that's a state-by-state issue--the federal government doesn't have much say in the internal administration of the state courts. Going after PACAR while completely ignoring that much more pressing problem smacks of not understanding the underlying issue (to be charitable), or going after the federal system because it's guaranteed to generate more outrage on the internet (to be less charitable). [1] Note that there is a ton of money to be made "disrupting" this industry through automation. To date, nobody has succeeded in building anything close to being as sophisticated as Lexis and Westlaw. Google Scholar is a pale imitation (to the point of not even being the same kind of product) that's only good for doing a bit of quick background research to save time and fees before you log onto Lexis or Westlaw.
anon_pariah 14y ago
I've yet to hear why the nominal 10c/pp charge is too onerous. If this information was truly no cost, it will likely become subject to abuse. I went through personal bankruptcy in 2009 and my personal history is available through pacer. I'm not proud of what I went through, and it was my own fault, but I at least take some solace in knowing that in order for scammers to access my information, they will have had to cull through many thousands of other cases at a cost of hundreds of dollars. Perhaps the answer then is to allow PACER access at public libraries without cost - having the access based on a physical location may help reduce the speed with which $criminal_element can build their portfolio.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
  Ten cents per page returned as search results.
- twoodfin 14y ago
  Regardless of how the PACER or JSTOR issues shake out, we're pretty clearly headed to a place where public records are all available for free to everyone. I wonder if we should rethink what needs to be a public record in light of legitimate concerns like yours.
- thinkcomp 14y ago
  "Ten cents doesn't seem like much, but when you consider that an average court case consists of thousands of pages of text in PDF files, those dimes add up rather quickly. When you further consider that in the course of prosecuting one's own court case, one must refer to many, many other cases because of the nature of legal precedent, legal research can suddenly cost thousands of dollars—and that's without even hiring an overpriced lawyer." http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=84 http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=84
- eli 14y ago
  SSN and similar is already supposed to be redacted in these records, no? If not, well that's something that needs fixing whether it's free or $0.10 per page. If I were a bad guy engaged in identity fraud, I imagine I would already have access to a stolen credit card for use with PACER.
OGinparadise 14y ago
Not sure making everything accessible via a Google search is liberating. People should have a right to move on, not have everything they did or said a few decades ago in depositions, lawsuits, bankruptcy, divorce or whatever on top of a Google search. Imagine your prospective employer searching for "your name" and reading what your ex-wife, landlord...said about you in a court case.
- cma 14y ago
  Maybe they would be able to make a better hiring decision.
  - OGinparadise 14y ago
    Maybe they would be able to make a better hiring decision. Of course, especially when almost anyone can say anything, unchallenged, in a court filing "He was emotionally abusive" or the "he was a very messy person." But fear not, soon enough everyone will be part of the system, one way or another.
    - cma 14y ago
      They could do the same thing in a blog post; they could even get the blog post notarized if they wanted to.
      - OGinparadise 14y ago
        Yes and no. For example during divorce they are trying to convince a judge and by extension get a lot more money, custody etc etc. So, the incentives to lie and dramatize things are much higher, for most people, during the divorce (or civil suit or...) case.
        cma 14y ago
        And what would blind employers to that incentive? There is also a counter-incentive known as perjury. Should we ban blogs because they allow for anonymous accusations that someone's employer might see?
jstalin 14y ago
As a user of PACER, it's very frustrating. $0.10 per "page" is total BS, since most federal filings are done electronically anyways. There is very little marginal cost for me to download a PDF from their servers. I wouldn't mind paying a flat monthly fee for access as opposed to the current fee schedule. PACER is definitely getting further and further behind the times. It seems designed to discourage use by its own users.
tlrobinson 14y ago
Why doesn't the government just make dumps of all documents available either by BitTorrent for free or on a hard drive at cost, and let the free market decide how much to charge (or not) for access?
- analog 14y ago
  Because PACER is a revenue stream for the courts.
- afarrell 14y ago
  Because they want to maintain a high-availability online system, not one where you have to wait for physical media in the mail or for someone to seed. How many law firms do you think would bother to use BitTorrent?
  - tlrobinson 14y ago
    My point was 3rd parties could provide the same service cheaper. The gov could continue to run PACER as it currently is too.
Irregardless 14y ago
I hate to rock the bandwagon, but this will accomplish nothing and it's pretty tactless. As rayiner has already pointed out, PACER is a source of court documents, not case law. 99% of the public would have no use for PACER documents even if they had completely free, open access. The people who truly have a legitimate need to access PACER documents are able to afford the fees, although that still doesn't mean the current fee structure is justified or fair. Many lawyers who use PACER also rely heavily on the fact that it's updated almost immediately -- a project like this could never accomplish that, and could lead to malpractice if used in its place. For example, you can't sue people for certain things if they've declared bankruptcy, so you need a reliable, up-to-date way to verify they haven't (a common strategy is to wait until the last minute to file bankruptcy just to delay legal proceedings). What's worse is that this project seems to be encouraging some kind of witch hunt: > Now he wants to make "every U.S. Attorney and AUSA's full career as a prosecutor available to the public to examine in its entirety." So those are the links queued up in Project Asymptote. That's how you want to honor Aaron? By using PACER and an army of volunteers to pursue someone's personal vendetta? I can't even begin to describe how tasteless that is; to take one of Aaron's projects and turn it into some kind of misguided inquisition, then call it a "poetic tribute to Aaron Swartz's memory". If you really want to make court documents available to everyone for free, then do that. Don't use Aaron as an excuse to target US prosecutors.
- analog 14y ago
  99% of the public wouldn't know what to do with PACER even if they had completely free, open access You could say the same about having free open access to your server's source code though.
  - hect0r 14y ago
    Not really as a lot of the PACER content relates to matters -- divorce, custody disputes, etc -- that is of no direct interest to you. Unlike your server source code.
    - jonknee 14y ago
afarrell 14y ago
Records access, storage and collection are not free. The network connections are also expensive. PACER has redundant commercial network connections to over 2000 courthouse locations. Although costs have come down, this system aggregates data from 94 separate districts, including Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii and the Northern Mariana Islands. It is triple redundant, so that the systems can survive any natural disaster. After Hurricane Sandy, records were still available and the courts were open for electronic filing even though the buildings were flooded and off the grid. These systems are far more expensive than a simple FTP server; they serve terabytes of data. The Federal Courts are open 24/7 for electronic filing, one of the more accessible government agencies in the world. PACER charges a fee to maintain the systems that support public access and improve IT services in the Federal Courts. It is very similar to using fishing license fees to support fisheries or drivers license fees to maintain the DMV. User fees are an important way to maintain systems separate from a reliance on the political system. PACER fees are the only fees coming into the Federal Courts that are not appropriated by Congress. Most of the fees are collected from the law firms that practice in Federal Court. One could argue that the funds to run PACER should in fact rely on the political system and come from congress. If you want to change this, contact the members of the House judiciary committee (http://judiciary.house.gov/ http://judiciary.house.gov/) and lobby them. However, the federal courts have not actually received a budget since September and are under a lot of stress to keep running despite this. One could argue that PACER should be charging 5 to 7 cents per page rather than 10 and should not be generating money for general court IT projects. But be aware that these projects are not frivolous. They save significant amounts of time for the litigants. Given the high cost of legal services, this helps reduce financial the burden on both prosecution and defense. With a cost of 10 cents per page up to a maximum of 3 dollars per document, the implicit comparison to a journal subscription which costs hundreds of dollars is specious. Also, this fee is waived if an individual's costs are less than $15. The OP acknowledges, "That means that any individual using PACER can download 150 pages every quarter for free." So the system is already free for anyone who is making casual use of it. There are also academic and financial-hardship waivers available. I argue, as many on HN have done about free-of-charge web services run by companies, that those who rely on a system in order to do business should pay for its upkeep in order to make sure the system stays around. Where does RECAP's funding come from? What standards of availability does it guarantee? If it succeeds in serving most documents but without an availability or document authenticity guarantee, what has been accomplished but a degradation of service? If this diverts most funding away from PACER and makes it harder to maintain reliably, will that actually increase public access to court records? Will that actually contribute to a more just world? As rayiner points out, state courts do not make their documents available nearly as freely as the federal court does. While that is separate from the argument over whether it is right to maintain PACER the way the court does, it does indicate that effort spent to increase access toward court records would be better allocated toward state courts. Also, one could argue that PACER's UI could be better. This is true. Anyone want to put together a proposal?
hect0r 14y ago
Why do people believe that this data is a "public good"? In the case of disputes between individuals, such as divorce, I do not accept that this information belongs to the general public and must be "emancipated". On the contrary, I believe that this is owned by the individual participants in the case and not the government or public. Only if they collectively agree to publish this material should it be available in public. There is no moral justification for the wholesale distribution and publication of material relating to other people's private lives and affairs.
- darkarmani 14y ago
  > There is no moral justification for the wholesale distribution and publication of material relating to other people's private lives and affairs. Should state recognized marriage be considered something that is considered private? If you want public recognition of your marriage it makes sense that it isn't private.
  - hect0r 14y ago
    A marriage is a private contract between consenting parties just like any other. The state should not get involved.
    - darkarmani 14y ago
      Maybe that is how it should be, but that isn't how it is right now. If you don't want public recognition of your marriage, I'm sure you could write up some private contracts, but it won't confer all of the same rights that a state-recognized marriage gets.
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    The only public record of your marriage is "X and Y got married." If your marriage included a prenup, that information is kept private. You don't have to state for the public record precisely why you feel like getting married. Seems fair the only public record of getting unmarried should be "X and Y got divorced."
spigoteater 14y ago
I see walls of text on a place called Hacker News taking issue with free information. Free information and damn the consequences.
- mpyne 14y ago
  "Kill them all; Let God sort them out"
spinlocked 14y ago
Stanford Vs MIT When MIT makes education widely available you get "open courseware" notes and unstructured videos. When Stanford makes education widely available you get coursra and udacity. When MIT is presented with Aaron Swartz you get unfair prosecution. When Stanford is presented with Aaron Swartz you get PACER. Hmm.
- homosaur 14y ago
  Ha! Alum much?
animalmom 14y ago
This is a bit of plug, but last summer I worked on a project that required PACER documents to identify judges who heard cases involving companies they owned stock in. http://cironline.org/reports/federal-judge%E2%80%99s-rulings-favored-companies-which-he-owned-stock-4030 http://cironline.org/reports/federal-judge%E2%80%99s-rulings... My colleague and I applied for a fee exemption as my employer, The Center for Investigative Reporting, is a non profit. We were able to examine enough PACER records to identify several judges with conflicts of interest but our work was cut short when our fee waiver was revoked. The waiver was revoked because we are members of the media (though we disclosed this in our application). http://californiawatch.org/money-and-politics/pacer-federal-court-record-fees-exceed-system-costs-18685 http://californiawatch.org/money-and-politics/pacer-federal-... Our lawyers are appealing the case which could lead to more open access to PACER and allow us to continue searching for conflicts of interest across the nation. If you support Swartz's efforts consider donating so we might continue our investigation. https://donate.centerforinvestigativereporting.org https://donate.centerforinvestigativereporting.org
halfninety 14y ago
Aside from other considerations, I'm afraid that abusing a good move (the $15 waiver) will discourage similar moves in the future.
ByronWarnken 14y ago
Every state and the Feds should have what Maryland has. http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/inquiry/inquiry-index.jsp http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/inquiry/inquiry-index.j... Its all cases, online. People should be able to do what they wish with the data. I, for one, have turned it into a business ranking lawyers. http://www.injurylawyerdatabase.com http://www.injurylawyerdatabase.com. This isn't going to be okay until we accept nothing less than a feed from all judicial data sources. Sometimes it's evasion. Mostly, governments are inept. Stop looking at this from a sinister standpoint. The business is in helping governments get the data online in an acceptable fashion while complying with all appropriate laws. Maryland's system should be a dinosaur. Instead, it's cutting edge. That's a situation that will be fixed. By whom? By you. Isn't this some sort of rockstar tech company launching pad?

202 points by thinkcomp 14y ago

Another HN user kindly pointed out to me in a related thread that the Gov't has modified their terms to specifically prohibit the use of RECAP. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059847 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059847

danielweber 14y ago
That is incorrect based on PACER's own words. PACER has a free version, but the free version limits your ability to transfer to other bodies. Although I'm sure that gets people freaking out, that's hardly RECAP being "prohibited." But, really, even with a 100% populated RECAP, all lawyers use PACER for their real work. The fact that any joker in the world can upload documents to RECAP makes it unsuitable for anything you are going to put before a judge. RECAP is fine for bloggers, though.
- thinkcomp 14y ago
  Huh? "any joker in the world can upload documents to RECAP makes it unsuitable for anything you are going to put before a judge" == FALSE For those documents that have been uploaded, RECAP's database contains bit for bit the same exact documents that are on PACER and nothing more. It's verified using an SHA1 hash. For example, see the document entries for http://ia700504.us.archive.org/29/items/gov.uscourts.mad.137971/gov.uscourts.mad.137971.docket.xml http://ia700504.us.archive.org/29/items/gov.uscourts.mad.137.... PACER does not provide hashes, but if you are worried that a document might have been compromised you can always download it from PACER and run the hash yourself.
  - daeken 14y ago
    How is that verified? Does PACER publish hashes or the like, so that RECAP can confirm that the documents are authentic? It seems pretty unlikely.
    - danielweber 14y ago
      He added to his comment to say that you can redownload all the documents from PACER to make sure none of them were altered. Which gets you absolutely nowhere. RECAP is the Wikipedia of law. Crowd-sourced, free, usually reliable -- but if you are relying on its accuracy as part of vigorously defending your client's interests to the best of your abilities, you have failed. EDIT: I think requiring PACER to provide SHA1 sums free-of-charge would probably be, on the whole, a good thing.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    https://www.recapthelaw.org/about/#authenticity https://www.recapthelaw.org/about/#authenticity "How do I know that the documents provided by RECAP are genuine? Unfortunately, you don’t. We rely on RECAP users to donate documents to the repository." I.e., any joker in the world can upload what they want to RECAP. It's a very useful service, but any actual lawyer relying on RECAP instead of paying pennies to get the documents from PACER is probably committing malpractice on his clients.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
  Here, in PACER's own words. http://www.pacer.gov/announcements/general/exemptnotice.html http://www.pacer.gov/announcements/general/exemptnotice.html "A fee exemption applies only for limited purposes. Any transfer of data obtained as the result of a fee exemption is prohibited unless expressly authorized by the court. Therefore, fee exempt PACER users must refrain from the use of RECAP. The prohibition on transfer of information received without fee is not intended to bar a quote or reference to information received as a result of a fee exemption in a scholarly or other similar work. "
  - danielweber 14y ago
    Yes, thank you for posting exactly what I said. If you take out the words and meaning of "fee exemption" you get something close to what you said.
    - fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
      It makes a slight problem for those who want to use RECAP in the manner suggested in OP's post.
  - thinkcomp 14y ago
    I discuss the court's ridiculous disclaimer here: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=85 http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=85
    - fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
      Oh, I agree that it is ridiculous, almost Monty Python ridiculous. I hope that you are successful, I will probably participate, and thank you for doing something. I think it is ridiculous for there to be any paywall for court information to start with. I hope that something like Veeck v SBCC will someday be applied. http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/293_F3d_791.htm http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/293_F3d_791.htm
  - esurc 14y ago

rayiner 14y ago

Much of this is quite uninformed, which makes me question the value of Mr. Foster's other points. > What other options are out there for accessing federal case law? Mr. Foster seems confused. PACER is a system for accessing court dockets, not a repository of case law. You can think of court docket's as a court's "inbox." When the parties file a complaint, motion, or brief, or when the judge issues an interlocutory order or other memorandum, it goes in the docket. Court dockets are mostly concerned with the mechanics of a single case--they are not intended to be a source of law. > Open government pioneer Carl Malamud says commercial ventures such as Lexis-Nexis, West Law, and Bloomberg Law compete for a $6.5 billion market built around extracting rents from this public commons: Mr. Foster completely mischaracterizes what Lexis and West do. These services do not charge you for access to the case law, which are in the public domain. What they do is provide a value-added service on top of the publicly available case law. They have armies of legally-trained professionals who read cases as they come out and annotate them with "head notes" which give summaries of the case and index the case into Lexis's or West's legal ontology. E.g. if I'm thinking of using a case to support a proposition, I can log on to West Law and have it give me a report of all the cases that cite that one. The report not only gives me a simple "citation list" like you can get with Google scholar, but a summary of the contexts in which each case was cited, whether it was referenced in a positive or negative light, and how extensively it was discussed. They can do this because they have (expensive) human readers who go through the cases to generate this meta-data.[1] This is not "extracting rents from the public commons." This is charging for the valuable service of organizing and summarizing publicly available information. There are legitimate complaints about access to case law. While all federal courts that I'm aware of freely post their opinions on their websites (e.g. http://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/recentop/week/recprec.htm http://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/recentop/week/recprec.htm), the same isn't true for all state courts. But as a practical matter that's a state-by-state issue--the federal government doesn't have much say in the internal administration of the state courts. Going after PACAR while completely ignoring that much more pressing problem smacks of not understanding the underlying issue (to be charitable), or going after the federal system because it's guaranteed to generate more outrage on the internet (to be less charitable). [1] Note that there is a ton of money to be made "disrupting" this industry through automation. To date, nobody has succeeded in building anything close to being as sophisticated as Lexis and Westlaw. Google Scholar is a pale imitation (to the point of not even being the same kind of product) that's only good for doing a bit of quick background research to save time and fees before you log onto Lexis or Westlaw.

anon_pariah 14y ago

I've yet to hear why the nominal 10c/pp charge is too onerous. If this information was truly no cost, it will likely become subject to abuse. I went through personal bankruptcy in 2009 and my personal history is available through pacer. I'm not proud of what I went through, and it was my own fault, but I at least take some solace in knowing that in order for scammers to access my information, they will have had to cull through many thousands of other cases at a cost of hundreds of dollars. Perhaps the answer then is to allow PACER access at public libraries without cost - having the access based on a physical location may help reduce the speed with which $criminal_element can build their portfolio.

fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
Ten cents per page returned as search results.
twoodfin 14y ago
Regardless of how the PACER or JSTOR issues shake out, we're pretty clearly headed to a place where public records are all available for free to everyone. I wonder if we should rethink what needs to be a public record in light of legitimate concerns like yours.
thinkcomp 14y ago
"Ten cents doesn't seem like much, but when you consider that an average court case consists of thousands of pages of text in PDF files, those dimes add up rather quickly. When you further consider that in the course of prosecuting one's own court case, one must refer to many, many other cases because of the nature of legal precedent, legal research can suddenly cost thousands of dollars—and that's without even hiring an overpriced lawyer." http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=84 http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=84
eli 14y ago
SSN and similar is already supposed to be redacted in these records, no? If not, well that's something that needs fixing whether it's free or $0.10 per page. If I were a bad guy engaged in identity fraud, I imagine I would already have access to a stolen credit card for use with PACER.

OGinparadise 14y ago

Not sure making everything accessible via a Google search is liberating. People should have a right to move on, not have everything they did or said a few decades ago in depositions, lawsuits, bankruptcy, divorce or whatever on top of a Google search. Imagine your prospective employer searching for "your name" and reading what your ex-wife, landlord...said about you in a court case.

cma 14y ago
Maybe they would be able to make a better hiring decision.
- OGinparadise 14y ago
  Maybe they would be able to make a better hiring decision. Of course, especially when almost anyone can say anything, unchallenged, in a court filing "He was emotionally abusive" or the "he was a very messy person." But fear not, soon enough everyone will be part of the system, one way or another.
  - cma 14y ago
    They could do the same thing in a blog post; they could even get the blog post notarized if they wanted to.
    - OGinparadise 14y ago
      Yes and no. For example during divorce they are trying to convince a judge and by extension get a lot more money, custody etc etc. So, the incentives to lie and dramatize things are much higher, for most people, during the divorce (or civil suit or...) case.
      - cma 14y ago
        And what would blind employers to that incentive? There is also a counter-incentive known as perjury. Should we ban blogs because they allow for anonymous accusations that someone's employer might see?

jstalin 14y ago

As a user of PACER, it's very frustrating. $0.10 per "page" is total BS, since most federal filings are done electronically anyways. There is very little marginal cost for me to download a PDF from their servers. I wouldn't mind paying a flat monthly fee for access as opposed to the current fee schedule. PACER is definitely getting further and further behind the times. It seems designed to discourage use by its own users.

tlrobinson 14y ago

Why doesn't the government just make dumps of all documents available either by BitTorrent for free or on a hard drive at cost, and let the free market decide how much to charge (or not) for access?

analog 14y ago
Because PACER is a revenue stream for the courts.
afarrell 14y ago
Because they want to maintain a high-availability online system, not one where you have to wait for physical media in the mail or for someone to seed. How many law firms do you think would bother to use BitTorrent?
- tlrobinson 14y ago
  My point was 3rd parties could provide the same service cheaper. The gov could continue to run PACER as it currently is too.

Irregardless 14y ago

I hate to rock the bandwagon, but this will accomplish nothing and it's pretty tactless. As rayiner has already pointed out, PACER is a source of court documents, not case law. 99% of the public would have no use for PACER documents even if they had completely free, open access. The people who truly have a legitimate need to access PACER documents are able to afford the fees, although that still doesn't mean the current fee structure is justified or fair. Many lawyers who use PACER also rely heavily on the fact that it's updated almost immediately -- a project like this could never accomplish that, and could lead to malpractice if used in its place. For example, you can't sue people for certain things if they've declared bankruptcy, so you need a reliable, up-to-date way to verify they haven't (a common strategy is to wait until the last minute to file bankruptcy just to delay legal proceedings). What's worse is that this project seems to be encouraging some kind of witch hunt: > Now he wants to make "every U.S. Attorney and AUSA's full career as a prosecutor available to the public to examine in its entirety." So those are the links queued up in Project Asymptote. That's how you want to honor Aaron? By using PACER and an army of volunteers to pursue someone's personal vendetta? I can't even begin to describe how tasteless that is; to take one of Aaron's projects and turn it into some kind of misguided inquisition, then call it a "poetic tribute to Aaron Swartz's memory". If you really want to make court documents available to everyone for free, then do that. Don't use Aaron as an excuse to target US prosecutors.

analog 14y ago
99% of the public wouldn't know what to do with PACER even if they had completely free, open access You could say the same about having free open access to your server's source code though.
- hect0r 14y ago
  Not really as a lot of the PACER content relates to matters -- divorce, custody disputes, etc -- that is of no direct interest to you. Unlike your server source code.
  - jonknee 14y ago

afarrell 14y ago

Records access, storage and collection are not free. The network connections are also expensive. PACER has redundant commercial network connections to over 2000 courthouse locations. Although costs have come down, this system aggregates data from 94 separate districts, including Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii and the Northern Mariana Islands. It is triple redundant, so that the systems can survive any natural disaster. After Hurricane Sandy, records were still available and the courts were open for electronic filing even though the buildings were flooded and off the grid. These systems are far more expensive than a simple FTP server; they serve terabytes of data. The Federal Courts are open 24/7 for electronic filing, one of the more accessible government agencies in the world. PACER charges a fee to maintain the systems that support public access and improve IT services in the Federal Courts. It is very similar to using fishing license fees to support fisheries or drivers license fees to maintain the DMV. User fees are an important way to maintain systems separate from a reliance on the political system. PACER fees are the only fees coming into the Federal Courts that are not appropriated by Congress. Most of the fees are collected from the law firms that practice in Federal Court. One could argue that the funds to run PACER should in fact rely on the political system and come from congress. If you want to change this, contact the members of the House judiciary committee (http://judiciary.house.gov/ http://judiciary.house.gov/) and lobby them. However, the federal courts have not actually received a budget since September and are under a lot of stress to keep running despite this. One could argue that PACER should be charging 5 to 7 cents per page rather than 10 and should not be generating money for general court IT projects. But be aware that these projects are not frivolous. They save significant amounts of time for the litigants. Given the high cost of legal services, this helps reduce financial the burden on both prosecution and defense. With a cost of 10 cents per page up to a maximum of 3 dollars per document, the implicit comparison to a journal subscription which costs hundreds of dollars is specious. Also, this fee is waived if an individual's costs are less than $15. The OP acknowledges, "That means that any individual using PACER can download 150 pages every quarter for free." So the system is already free for anyone who is making casual use of it. There are also academic and financial-hardship waivers available. I argue, as many on HN have done about free-of-charge web services run by companies, that those who rely on a system in order to do business should pay for its upkeep in order to make sure the system stays around. Where does RECAP's funding come from? What standards of availability does it guarantee? If it succeeds in serving most documents but without an availability or document authenticity guarantee, what has been accomplished but a degradation of service? If this diverts most funding away from PACER and makes it harder to maintain reliably, will that actually increase public access to court records? Will that actually contribute to a more just world? As rayiner points out, state courts do not make their documents available nearly as freely as the federal court does. While that is separate from the argument over whether it is right to maintain PACER the way the court does, it does indicate that effort spent to increase access toward court records would be better allocated toward state courts. Also, one could argue that PACER's UI could be better. This is true. Anyone want to put together a proposal?

hect0r 14y ago

Why do people believe that this data is a "public good"? In the case of disputes between individuals, such as divorce, I do not accept that this information belongs to the general public and must be "emancipated". On the contrary, I believe that this is owned by the individual participants in the case and not the government or public. Only if they collectively agree to publish this material should it be available in public. There is no moral justification for the wholesale distribution and publication of material relating to other people's private lives and affairs.

darkarmani 14y ago
> There is no moral justification for the wholesale distribution and publication of material relating to other people's private lives and affairs. Should state recognized marriage be considered something that is considered private? If you want public recognition of your marriage it makes sense that it isn't private.
- hect0r 14y ago
  A marriage is a private contract between consenting parties just like any other. The state should not get involved.
  - darkarmani 14y ago
    Maybe that is how it should be, but that isn't how it is right now. If you don't want public recognition of your marriage, I'm sure you could write up some private contracts, but it won't confer all of the same rights that a state-recognized marriage gets.
- tedunangst 14y ago
  The only public record of your marriage is "X and Y got married." If your marriage included a prenup, that information is kept private. You don't have to state for the public record precisely why you feel like getting married. Seems fair the only public record of getting unmarried should be "X and Y got divorced."

spigoteater 14y ago

I see walls of text on a place called Hacker News taking issue with free information. Free information and damn the consequences.

mpyne 14y ago
"Kill them all; Let God sort them out"

spinlocked 14y ago

Stanford Vs MIT When MIT makes education widely available you get "open courseware" notes and unstructured videos. When Stanford makes education widely available you get coursra and udacity. When MIT is presented with Aaron Swartz you get unfair prosecution. When Stanford is presented with Aaron Swartz you get PACER. Hmm.

homosaur 14y ago
Ha! Alum much?

animalmom 14y ago

This is a bit of plug, but last summer I worked on a project that required PACER documents to identify judges who heard cases involving companies they owned stock in. http://cironline.org/reports/federal-judge%E2%80%99s-rulings-favored-companies-which-he-owned-stock-4030 http://cironline.org/reports/federal-judge%E2%80%99s-rulings... My colleague and I applied for a fee exemption as my employer, The Center for Investigative Reporting, is a non profit. We were able to examine enough PACER records to identify several judges with conflicts of interest but our work was cut short when our fee waiver was revoked. The waiver was revoked because we are members of the media (though we disclosed this in our application). http://californiawatch.org/money-and-politics/pacer-federal-court-record-fees-exceed-system-costs-18685 http://californiawatch.org/money-and-politics/pacer-federal-... Our lawyers are appealing the case which could lead to more open access to PACER and allow us to continue searching for conflicts of interest across the nation. If you support Swartz's efforts consider donating so we might continue our investigation. https://donate.centerforinvestigativereporting.org https://donate.centerforinvestigativereporting.org

halfninety 14y ago

Aside from other considerations, I'm afraid that abusing a good move (the $15 waiver) will discourage similar moves in the future.

ByronWarnken 14y ago

Every state and the Feds should have what Maryland has. http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/inquiry/inquiry-index.jsp http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/inquiry/inquiry-index.j... Its all cases, online. People should be able to do what they wish with the data. I, for one, have turned it into a business ranking lawyers. http://www.injurylawyerdatabase.com http://www.injurylawyerdatabase.com. This isn't going to be okay until we accept nothing less than a feed from all judicial data sources. Sometimes it's evasion. Mostly, governments are inept. Stop looking at this from a sinister standpoint. The business is in helping governments get the data online in an acceptable fashion while complying with all appropriate laws. Maryland's system should be a dinosaur. Instead, it's cutting edge. That's a situation that will be fixed. By whom? By you. Isn't this some sort of rockstar tech company launching pad?