Is sharing court documents a violation of copyright law?
The court-created documents provided by PACER are works of the federal government, and under copyright law, are automatically placed in the public domain and may be shared without legal restriction. The question is a little bit more complicated for documents filed by third parties, so we asked a prominent legal scholar about it. He told us that such documents may be under copyright, but he thought redistributing copyrighted court documents was legal under copyright's fair use doctrine. However, there is very little case law in this area (some examples are here and here), so it's impossible to be sure. We certainly believe citizens ought to have the freedom to share public court documents, and we hope RECAP users will help to establish that precedent.
The PACER "policies and procedures" prohibit "any attempt to collect data from PACER in a manner which avoids billing." Is this what RECAP is designed to do?
Absolutely not. PACER charges users for the documents they download from PACER. RECAP users pay for every document they download from PACER, just like any other user. RECAP simply gives users a second option: to easily share documents directly with one another, as they're permitted to do under copyright law. When a user downloads a RECAP document, the document comes directly from our server; the process imposes no additional load on PACER's web servers.
https://free.law/recap/faq
Is sharing court documents a violation of copyright law?
The court-created documents provided by PACER are works of the federal government, and under copyright law, are automatically placed in the public domain and may be shared without legal restriction. The question is a little bit more complicated for documents filed by third parties, so we asked a prominent legal scholar about it. He told us that such documents may be under copyright, but he thought redistributing copyrighted court documents was legal under copyright's fair use doctrine. However, there is very little case law in this area (some examples are here and here), so it's impossible to be sure. We certainly believe citizens ought to have the freedom to share public court documents, and we hope RECAP users will help to establish that precedent.
The PACER "policies and procedures" prohibit "any attempt to collect data from PACER in a manner which avoids billing." Is this what RECAP is designed to do?
Absolutely not. PACER charges users for the documents they download from PACER. RECAP users pay for every document they download from PACER, just like any other user. RECAP simply gives users a second option: to easily share documents directly with one another, as they're permitted to do under copyright law. When a user downloads a RECAP document, the document comes directly from our server; the process imposes no additional load on PACER's web servers.