Looks like a good target for the US Digital Service.
[1] "Every day, millions of people interact with the American government. We apply for Social Security benefits and small business loans. We look for affordable health insurance and financial aid. We need passports and tax refunds. Too often, these interactions can be frustrating and cumbersome because of outdated tools and unreliable systems. Government is ready for a change." -- https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-ser...
I don't really understand the criticism of PACER. It's not necessary to use PACER to access case law. Federal court opinions are published on each court's website, and collected by a number of sources that aggregate them (I've never run across a case that wasn't on Google Scholar). PACER is a filing system used by litigants. The search and other features work great for their intended purpose, which is looking up dockets and keeping track of documents in dockets. You can't full-text search across dockets, but why would you?
You can't full-text search across dockets, but why would you?
Also, why would you full-text search across the entire internet? That would be absurd! /s
There are innumerable benefits to the widespread instantaneous access to information we enjoy today, and it's absurd that our access to information should be fettered when it comes to public government records.
I used PACER to look up that guy who DDoS attacked Hacker Dojo earlier this year and wasn't charged a dime for it, because it cost me $2.60 to download his entire docket. To be clear, I used my computer, on the Internet, to download a couple dozen documents in a U.S. federal criminal trial, and I paid $2.60 instead of having to drive to the courthouse in San Jose and wait in line. I spent more than that for coffee today.
Somehow this is an outrage, apparently, but I had to scroll for five minutes to find out why. A reporter from the Times reading a PACER case is generating more than the $10-$15 she will spend on the case when she publishes the investigative report. The one day a year I need PACER, it's pretty much free for me. I simply cannot comprehend the outrage here, because public records clearinghouses are by their very nature special cases. His problems are not my problems.
Why is the approach here to spitefully crawl the service and make it more expensive for everyone, rather than designing a clearinghouse for open access data of all forms in a marketable solution for governments to use? PACER does much, much more than docket access, too, and it shows in the text that the guy is not a lawyer. Legal teams pretty much live on PACER when they're in a federal case, and you file through it as well.
Crawling the service doesn't make it more expensive for anyone. The price is already set, and the marginal cost of serving a document is practically zero. Congrats on being able to spend $2.60 without thinking about it, but not everyone is so fortunate. If you cannot understand why this is problematic, you are simply small-minded. Not only does this system erect an economically regressive barrier between the proceedings of the judiciary and the public, it precludes analysis of the judicial system through a wider lens and the utilization of statistical analysis and other big data technologies.
Bandwidth, storage space, digitization, records management, salaries for the employees involved, and secure delivery infrastructure are very far from free. Crawling nearly 1 TB of data from a system absolutely makes it more expensive for everyone; what do you think, transit, bandwidth, and storage just appear from thin air? I could go on for a long time about how often records management systems keep some data cold and the dozens of infrastructure concerns that undermine your idealistic position. The cost of serving you a document under intense regulatory scrutiny (ever heard of the OMB?) is not "practically zero," and it is incredibly short-sighted to allege that it is so.
It's easy to sit as a startup employee and think "gosh, you could just throw all those documents in MongoDB and have some fun!" but the reality is that government and traditional corporate environments do not work that way. You didn't think about Sarbanes-Oxley when you were designing your billing and accounting system, did you? Do you even know what it is? For better or worse, systems outside of Silicon Valley are under intense regulatory pressure. Some of that is absolutely essential: Sarbox is one of them, and it was reactionary to mostly Enron. Document delivery and management can be expensive when you have a broader perspective, which is that government is incredibly complex and convoluted. Look how much they spend a year on PACER and tell me I'm wrong. If you want to reform something, reform that.
I won't address the rest of your comment because it is completely uncalled for.
Different judges define "opinions" differently. Not every material opinion is published on a court's site.
There are all kinds of research tasks that require searching full-text briefs and viewing dockets.
PACER is a filing system used by reporters, the general public, litigants, and opposing counsel. The fact that public domain materials are locked up behind a paywall illegally is borderline criminal.
> The fact that public domain materials are locked up behind a paywall illegally is borderline criminal.
(a) Court dockets are not public domain, they're often public record, which is an important difference and (b) pretty much every jurisdiction on the books has set it up so that agencies can recoup their costs when records are accessed. As an example, to get full parcel data for Alameda County, a CD-ROM is $20,000. Considering most of those records involve measurements in furlongs and chains and date from the Gold Rush era, I can understand that digitizing was expensive, but right next to it is a ZIP containing almost the same thing in Shapefile form for free.
Nobody said governmental fees to access public records are logical, but calling efforts to recoup costs "illegal" and "borderline criminal" is a bit much. Rein it in. Those are serious (and false) things to say, specifically because of the legislation allowing the practice in almost every venue. Call it anything else like "misguided," and I'm with you. Illegal? Come prepared.
"In general, all government records are in the public domain and may be freely used." --http://www.archives.gov/faqs/
NARA houses archived court records. I don't know of any exception for live court records. These are public domain materials we're talking about, so long as they're not under seal.
Read the E-Government Act of 2002 and the associated Congressional reports telling the judiciary to stop charging for PACER materials (summarized at http://freelawproject.org/2015/03/23/why-should-congress-car...). It is both illegal and theft from the public on a massive scale. I stand by "criminal."
You piqued my curiosity, citing a public law in your defense of a position that a federal agency is operating illegally, so I did. You missed §205(e) of that Act, which modifies Public Law 102-140 §303(a) to read:
SEC. 303. (a) The Judicial Conference may, only to the extent necessary,
prescribe reasonable fees, pursuant to sections 1913, 1914, 1926, and 1930 of
title 28, United States Code, for collection by the courts under those sections
for access to information available through automatic data processing equipment.
So, your citation actually disagrees with you. I didn't bother to study further to see if this has been amended (it almost certainly has), because I was mainly interested in your defensive citation.
As I said, these are based on costs. The method of determining those costs is probably flawed and we can debate that all day long, but the fees are legally permitted. Throwing terms around like "illegal" and "criminal" undermines the point you have.
I didn't miss anything. I've researched this extensively--see the lawsuit against the AO referenced in my other comment on this thread.
The Act specifies "only to the extent necessary" and "reasonable" fees. $0.10 per page is not supported as being "necessary" or "reasonable" by any legal scholar, economist, or other source. It's an arbitrary round number that is in no way based on the cost of bandwidth, which is zero at the margin. Therefore the present fees are not legally permitted. The only fees permitted are so small they don't even register; in other words, the fees are not permitted.
Nor am I "throwing around terms." There is a law; the judiciary is violating it willfully. They are taking money from citizens with no legal basis; that is typically referred to as conversion or theft, which is criminal.
If you want to get into semantics, check your definition of "federal agency." The courts don't qualify according to some precedent, which is part of why we have this mess. Otherwise the Administrative Procedure Act would apply and force some accountability.
As someone who has a paid PACER account, the charges aren't a big deal. Opinions and decisions are free. Only if you need the detailed documents as a case progresses is there a charge. It would be nice to have all that searchable with Google, but it's not a high priority.
I am all for pacer reform, but I cannot see more than .05% of readers getting past the statues analogy around line 7, where this document has yet to even hint at the argument it is making. Also, lots of unexplained, unreadable, unrelated text at the top. It begins "IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR PUBLIC OPINION." Well, please think about what this means. It means, each time you make us read something like that before getting to the point you lose about half of the public, and this document does about 30 times over.
[1] "Every day, millions of people interact with the American government. We apply for Social Security benefits and small business loans. We look for affordable health insurance and financial aid. We need passports and tax refunds. Too often, these interactions can be frustrating and cumbersome because of outdated tools and unreliable systems. Government is ready for a change." -- https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-ser...