4 ms·

There are legitimate complaints about access to court dockets as well. While you assume that the public isn't interested in court dockets, there are important s

by rsingel 14y ago

There are legitimate complaints about access to court dockets as well. While you assume that the public isn't interested in court dockets, there are important segments of the population that do want that. Take for instance reporters. Say for instance I wanted to cover a court trial. If I want to see if there's a new filing, I have to login to PACER daily and pay ten cents to see a court docket. Then if there is a filing, I have to pay more money just to see the filing (10 cents a page for the first 30 pages). There's no way to "follow" a case. And following cases manually gets very expensive very quickly. Say I was a legal scholar interested in patent cases in certain districts? How would I access those cases? Or say I was just a citizen who wanted to stay on top of the Google vs. Oracle trial. None of these use cases require any of the "value-add" from Lexis-Nexis and they are all democratic with a lower case d. PACER is largely useless for any of these use cases, because it is regarded as a slush fund for the court system, which has NO incentive to do right by the public. $15 free per month would get you about 3 days of filings in the Google/Oracle case. A publicly free PACER, one that's actually useful to the public, could e paid for by slightly higher fees for attorney submissions. Would it eat into LEXIS or West profits? Probably a tiny bit in the short term. Long term, it presents a long-term existential threat as a much cheaper, more democratic indexing system could eventually supplant those two. Regardless of those two, there are compelling reasons for this data to be public to anyone who wants and the technology to do so isn't that complicated anymore. Which is to say, I love the RECAP project, but it shouldn't be necessary.

rayiner 14y ago
This has nothing to do with protecting Lexis/West's profits (there is very little that's on PACER that's also on Lexis/West that isn't also on e.g. Google Scholar). It has everything to do with understanding why things are the way they are. Mr. Foster drags Lexis/West into it so he can work the "$6.5 billion" + government conspiracy angle to build outrage, even though blaming Lexis/West for PACER's problems makes no sense, nor does it give any insight into how the system evolved to its present state. Someone has to pay for the operation of the court system. Usage fees are an (until now) uncontroversial way to do that. They reflect a policy choice: do we want to completely subsidize a government service, or push some of the costs of running it onto the people who directly use it? Thus, you see usage fees in many different contexts: toll roads, subway fares, traffic tickets, parking meters, court filing fees, and access to public records. There are lots of kinds of public records that require paying a fee (you should price a FOIA request sometime). Are usage fees a bad idea for court dockets? You're welcome to make that argument. But make that argument for what it is: a proposal to subsidize one kind of access to the court system by diverting revenues from elsewhere. Evaluate the costs and benefits of those proposals. E.g. are higher filing fees (for people appealing to the court system for justice) worthwhile in order to allow reporters, etc, cheaper access to dockets? These are practical, concrete, educated arguments. But don't clothe your argument in uneducated conspiracy theory bullshit.
- rsingel 14y ago
  Not true. Lexis makes lots of money from providing services like docket tracking. Subsidize one kind of access? Public access is the only one that matters. And in actuality, there's no need to raise filing fees. The courts get paid lots of money by Lexis and West. It builds them an IT slush fund. It builds Lexis and West a business moat. That's not conspiracy bullshit. That's basic economics.

by rsingel 14y ago

rayiner 14y ago

This has nothing to do with protecting Lexis/West's profits (there is very little that's on PACER that's also on Lexis/West that isn't also on e.g. Google Scholar). It has everything to do with understanding why things are the way they are. Mr. Foster drags Lexis/West into it so he can work the "$6.5 billion" + government conspiracy angle to build outrage, even though blaming Lexis/West for PACER's problems makes no sense, nor does it give any insight into how the system evolved to its present state. Someone has to pay for the operation of the court system. Usage fees are an (until now) uncontroversial way to do that. They reflect a policy choice: do we want to completely subsidize a government service, or push some of the costs of running it onto the people who directly use it? Thus, you see usage fees in many different contexts: toll roads, subway fares, traffic tickets, parking meters, court filing fees, and access to public records. There are lots of kinds of public records that require paying a fee (you should price a FOIA request sometime). Are usage fees a bad idea for court dockets? You're welcome to make that argument. But make that argument for what it is: a proposal to subsidize one kind of access to the court system by diverting revenues from elsewhere. Evaluate the costs and benefits of those proposals. E.g. are higher filing fees (for people appealing to the court system for justice) worthwhile in order to allow reporters, etc, cheaper access to dockets? These are practical, concrete, educated arguments. But don't clothe your argument in uneducated conspiracy theory bullshit.

rsingel 14y ago
Not true. Lexis makes lots of money from providing services like docket tracking. Subsidize one kind of access? Public access is the only one that matters. And in actuality, there's no need to raise filing fees. The courts get paid lots of money by Lexis and West. It builds them an IT slush fund. It builds Lexis and West a business moat. That's not conspiracy bullshit. That's basic economics.