3 ms·
The article begs the question: Will it be completely free or behind yet another artificial but officially-sanctioned paywall and login like PACER.gov? The arti
by rab_oof 12y ago
The article begs the question: Will it be completely free or behind yet another artificial but officially-sanctioned paywall and login like PACER.gov? The article clearly didn't any meaningful research because PACER and similar state/federal outsourced/homegrown paywalls are bullshit, and likely why SCOTUS advocated a separate system. The key is whether it will truly provide free and open access to decisions and documents. If not, it would be another Not Invented Here duplication of PACER. (Let's assume it won't be as crappy as PACER, because SCOTUS is presumed to contain a measure of common-sense.)
The bigger meta question is: why are courts still allowed to monetize the automated services that are provided at neglible unit cost? Just because lawyers are often chisels doesn't mean the government is allowed to profit from the restriction of access to the people's information, and that automated processes (downloading PDFs) are no longer equivocable to manually making copies of thousands of pages of documents. This puts an undue burden on most people that don't have millions of dollars to throw around and it puts up a barrier to actual transparency of legal artifacts. These sorts of things should be free, but the article does neither explicitly state nor implicitly hint to the cost of this yet-to-be-named SCOTUS system.
Even more meta: Shouldn't civil rights include the freedom to access all public information produced by a government with minimal (at cost of delivery) or no cost?
(IANALBIPOOTI)