Financial cost is one if the many ways the Government intentionally limits your access to your ability to uphold your rights.
PACER is for federal courts, price is $1 per page.<p>I'm being sued in the State of Idaho, where the price of each page is $10.
courtlistener and the Recap program fill a vital niche at the moment.<p>Recap takes any PACER document you purchase and automatically adds it to CourtListener for others to see/download.<p>Hopefully it will become obsolete soon!
If anything it'd be free for approved partners. Think large legal firms, language model data collectors, etc
> the public should not have to pay to read the law<p>This goes back to Hammurabi. These decisions <i>are</i> the law. We pay tax dollars to create all this and even if we didn’t, if we’re held to these rulings we need to be able to read them.
Makes sense. Courts serve the public. It makes no sense to pay twice for that.
>The bill would replace the aging PACER and CM/ECF systems with a modern, unified platform designed to improve public access, strengthen cybersecurity, and reduce long-term costs.<p><a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...</a>
Free to humans possibly.
there was a website for this<p><a href="https://courtwatch.us/" rel="nofollow">https://courtwatch.us/</a>
[dead]
I actually approve of the something closer to the status quo here. Court filings contain a lot of sensitive information about the litigants.<p>It is one thing for the records to be publicly available, as they must be. It is a very different thing for every speck of material in them to be instantly available to anyone, anywhere, worldwide, for any purpose.
Material that shouldn't be published for any reason is already subject to a sealing process. What else is needed?
Isn't that basically the same as saying court filings should be available, but not to poor people?
No. They should be available for legit use cases and not available for data scrapers who will use it to facilitate algorithmic housing and employment discrimination. Especially not available for scammers who make mugshot extortion websites.
No. Indigent users can already request fee exemptions, and that can be expanded. Access can be provided at courthouses and public libraries. (I don’t know if that is already a practice for PACER specifically, but it should be.)
You can easily burn through hundreds of dollars researching one or two relatively small court cases. I don't think you should be indigent or go to the courthouse/public library to avoid spending hundreds of dollars for that small amount of research.
There's "can't afford" and "can't justify the expense". I'm certainly not poor and at basically no amount above free would I justify the expense. So any cost is completely unacceptable, especially given how much the public pays to produce these results. No more excuses, no more lame justifications, no more hiding.
PACER fees are waived if they are under $15 per quarter.<p>That's about 150 pages of material.
Then why do you think they should be public?
I think it should be public to be a general check the public can engage with against judges, cops, and court participants.<p>Consider cases like Cash for Kids. It potentially could have been caught a lot quicker if we had the data publicly available to see "How does this judge usually rule". Today, proving that a judge has is bias is pretty hard, but imagine if we could see "This judge always denies motions when the claimant or their lawyers are Irish".<p>Or consider dirty cops. Imagine being able to search all the drug arrests of a cop and finding out "Hmm, this cop is finding meth on everyone he pulls over". That's a valuable tool for the next victim of the cop that gets accused of meth possession. As it currently stands, we basically rely on the cop not forgetting to cover their cameras.<p>Having more data available makes it easier systematic analysis and mining a whole lot easier.
Because “publicly available with some friction” has a fundamentally different character than “indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers”. That type of information access wasn't even fathomable when the concept of public records was born. It enables a lot of uses where I would argue that the harms outweigh the benefits.
> indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers<p>Any fee that is acceptable for "normal use" is not high enough to deter the likes of Google or the big AI developers.<p>Google, a company that custom develops specialized automobiles to <i>regularly</i> drive ~all the streets in the world for the purposes of having imagery for a mapping app. Google, a company that (before it even got really rich), developed custom book-scanning technology to scan all the books it could acquire.<p>The big AI providers are in litigation now because even licensing terms that prevent use are no deterrent, they just stole the content they wanted to train their models.<p>The fee won't deter the cases you want, it will only harm the rest of us.
Yeah, I think this is a bad take on the part of the EFF.<p>The full dataset will be in private hands and available everywhere to everyone to do anything the moment this goes live.<p>I protect data for a living, cost asymmetry and proof of work are really the only tools we have.<p>If this goes live, the next time I get subpoenaed to testify for something I'm going to throw in so many random but couched accusations at people just to screw them over when the data goes live at scale via data brokers and torrent dumps.<p>Bill Jones (accused in court testimony of killing puppies) is requesting the HOA get off of his back.
I see a valid point here, however, some court rulings create binding precedents. As I understand it, <i>those</i> can be paywalled in PACER. Binding precedents are part of the law everyone within the relevant jurisdiction is required to obey, and it is unjust for any part of the law to not be freely available.<p>It may be reasonable to put limits on free public access to records where there's a privacy concern.
At least within the federal court system, binding precedent is already freely available. Only circuit courts and SCOTUS can create binding precedent, and the opinions of those courts are freely available on their respective sites, outside of PACER. E.g., here's the 9th circuit: <a href="https://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/decisions/opinions/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/decisions/opinions/</a>
So interesting point about things being public vs not:<p>If congressional votes are private, you never REALLY know if your congressperson is actually voting in your best interests. You only see certain bills pass and if they are in your favor, you can probably make some assumptions if they voted or not.<p>If the votes are public, now EVERYONE can see who they voted for. That sounds great! Then you realize that lobbyists can also see who the congressperson voted for. Lobbyists that have a lot more money and influence than you do. Lobbyists that can hold back millions if the vote is against their interests.<p>My point isn't that one format isn't better than the other. My point is that there are "no solutions, only tradeoffs"
what's the problem with everyone knowing how a rep votes? their voting should be a matter of record, not any form of leverage. the dumpsterfire of campaign finance is completely orthogonal (and also both important and simple to solve).
Do you think there is a tradeoff in this case? If so, what is the best counterargument against making PACER records free? I think it's important to note, as the article does, that these records are already "public" (that's what the "P" stands for) what's at issue is whether you should be charged a fee to access them.
ban lobbying