“Free PACER” bill advances through Senate judiciary unanimously

https://fixthecourt.com/2021/12/free-pacer-bill-advances-senate-judiciary-unanimously/

by walterbell • 5 years ago

456 145 5 years ago

PACER is a wonderful tool, but the current website is Byzantine. I'm very happy that it's getting some much-needed attention.

Shicholas• 5 years ago

how is PACER wonderful? charging exorbitant fees to access the laws that govern me is a complete racket.

inoffensivename2• 5 years ago

Well, the fees aren't wonderful, but the information you can get out of it is excellent. I grew up in not-America, where access to court records is even more difficult and expensive (e.g. have to have a lawyer do it for you).

I didn't know that Free PACER was a thing, but I'm happy that it is!

sgent2• 5 years ago

It is, and its 100% funded by the fees they charge attorney's and others to access the documents. The amount of fees and use of them is somewhat ridiculous currently, but if they remove the fees without setting up an ongoing funding source I'm afraid it will stagnate like many state court systems.

toomuchtodo2• 5 years ago

Hats off to the Free Law Project for championing this. Success is possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158

mminer2372• 5 years ago

Giving the article contenteditable=true is certainly...a choice, especially because that makes the links unclickable.

gibolt• 5 years ago

Probably done by the editor, and forgot to disable it when shipping to prod ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

smegsicle• 5 years ago

Ha! a mockup mode they forgot to turn off, right? it doesn't seem to be on other pages.

Note that links are still right-clickable, took me a second to try that.

blendergeek• 5 years ago

It looks fixed now.

mminer2372• 5 years ago

It's good to see when good tools, like RECAP, become obsolete because of wider improvements. Mission accomplished.

It's also good to see unanimous bipartisan action doing simple good things.

zestyping• 5 years ago

As one of the developers of RECAP, I am delighted to see the project become obsolete!

pabs32• 5 years ago

Please have Archive Team copy the RECAP site to archive.org before you shut down the project and site.

https://archiveteam.org/

AlbertCory3• 5 years ago

Great work, guys!

As an aside, do you have any (broad) insights into who installs the browser extensions? I don't mean the individual people -- I mean is it media, law firms, students...?

romanzubenko2• 5 years ago

This is great news. I had to implement PACER integration back in my days at Gusto for compliance and the pricing among many other things was very annoying to work with. The pricing is based on "number of pages" returned, which means that when you submit a query you don't know exactly how it will cost you ahead of time.

ianhawes• 5 years ago

That’s the best part of PACER!

The other exciting thing is the threatening letter you get from the government when they can’t charge your expired credit card for $9 and threaten to withhold that amount from your tax return if you don’t pay the balance.

romanzubenko2• 5 years ago

The best part was for us was that after wrangling with their native API, we decided to go with one of the private companies that provide sane API wrapper on top of PACER. It's kinda crazy that there is a small industry of companies who make government api better. You can see some of these services by googling "bankruptcy monitoring".

fooqux2• 5 years ago

This sounds awesome! Now here's hoping they might do the same for the tax system someday. If only Intuit could stop lobbying to keep it a horrible train wreck.

toomuchtodo2• 5 years ago

Call your representatives. Share your concerns. In volume, it moves the needle.

fooqux2• 5 years ago

You're right. I haven't done that in awhile. Thank you for the reminder.

jessaustin2• 5 years ago

Has the tax system ever become less of a trainwreck? I'm not an expert, but the trainwreckedness seems to monotonically increase. On multiple occasions in the past, significant numbers of voters have contacted their representatives to discuss just this topic. Why didn't voicing their concerns work on those occasions, and why will it be different this time around?

1024core• 5 years ago

It just boggles the mind that in a society ruled by laws, access to said laws would be locked up behind a paywall.

mumblemumble2• 5 years ago

It's not that unusual. PACER's pricing was ridiculous, but, in principle and from a historical perspective, having to pay for access to information has been the norm. And for understandable reasons. Only a generation ago, access to court records naturally cost money, because neither paper nor file clerks' time is free.

It's only within the past couple decades that technology has reduced the costs associated with providing public access to court records down to a level where it's easy to contemplate making the service free to all users as part of the public budget.

robflynn• 5 years ago

I was shocked the first time I needed to download something from PACER and saw that the pricing was per-page (of a PDF!)

bell-cot• 5 years ago

The old "He who has the gold makes the rules" trick works even better when those without the gold only get to learn the rules when & where convenient to those with. Or they have to give up whatever silver they've managed to scrape together in order to learn some of the current rules.

cyral• 5 years ago

It reminds me of how ISO standards, from date specifications, to the hz for the musical note "A", to railway engineering, have to be purchased from ISO just for the PDF.

ChrisMarshallNY• 5 years ago

It reminds me of how ISO standards, from date specifications, to the hz for the musical note "A", to railway engineering, have to be purchased from ISO just for the PDF.

At eye-watering rates.

https://webstore.ansi.org/Search/Find?st=iso&v=5&cp=1&f1=Sta...

tiahura3• 5 years ago

They are not. Court of appeals decisions (a decision that's of precedential value) and any district court decision of importance are public already.

This makes public district court opinions nobody cares about (ok I suppose), as well as the pleadings and motions filed by the parties in the case. Those documents contain a treasure trove of private information that wasn't disclosed with the expectation of broad public dissemination.

afarrell• 5 years ago

On the one hand, this is a good thing for the easy ability to access public information.

On the other hand, this removes an important backup source of funding for the US federal courts.

On the gripping hand, it is bonkers that court admins are wise to prepare for the 2023 government shutdown.

smg• 5 years ago

Does this mean that all the documents (emails from tech executives) that are part of the evidence for a court case will be publicly available?

pwned1• 5 years ago

No, generally evidence is not filed as part of a docket. PACER only includes court filings such as the complaint, answer, motions, orders, etc.

granzymes• 5 years ago

And quotations from evidence produced during discovery are often redacted from those filings.

kingcharles5• 5 years ago

They are already publicly available. You can access up to, IIRC, $30 worth of PACER for free each month. I know my access usually comes under the free boundary.

But as poster below mentions, it depends on how the documents exist. There are two types of documents in a court case: common law record and discovery.

Discovery = evidence kept by both sides, but not held by the court. This includes written documents, audio/video recordings, but also the transcripts of any depositions that have been taken of important people in the law suit. (A deposition is where you sit down with a person and question them under oath outside of the court room)

Common law record = anything that is said in court, or filed in court.

Most discovery never makes it into a court room. It is just shuffled back and forth between the plaintiff and defendant.

Now, when it comes time to file a motion (let's say one of the parties tries to get the case dismissed) then it will usually be necessary to attach some documents as exhibits to the motion to clarify the point you are making to the judge. At that point, those documents will make it into the public record and will be in PACER.

Even if something isn't filed in court, if the court case is USA v. TechBro, for instance, then as the USA is a governmental entity it is subject to FOIA and you can often get a copy of all the discovery that way. I often use FOIA just to avoid PACER fees.

tiahura3• 5 years ago

Terrible news.

Federal court isn't personal information mother lode that state courts would be, but there's all sorts of stuff in there that doesn't need to be widely disseminated. If you're just interested in the occasional document, that's already free. This is just going to enable the worst sort of data harvesting.

setpatchaddress• 5 years ago

I understand your concern, but you're advocating for a form of security-through-obscurity. Data harvesting of this information is already available to bad actors. If information must be private for security reasons, it should not be in the public court records in the first place.

tiahura3• 5 years ago

It’s already available to anyone. Your first $X / month is free, and after that, it’s like $.10 page. Or, you can drive to the courthouse and snoop for free all day long.

Mostly, this just facilitates more adtech and profile building. I don’t see the benefit.

torstenvl• 5 years ago

Can you provide a citation for the proposition that rate-limiting is a form of security-through-obscurity? That seems like a pretty novel interpretation to me.

pirate787• 5 years ago

This information pre-dates the internet age. Lots of sensitive personal info.

encryptluks2• 5 years ago

Courts already allow you to request that documents be flagged as sensitive.

IncandescentGas• 5 years ago

I think you're right. Pacer is basically free for any of us wanting to look something up reasonably. The people that care are the people that want to harvest the data contained therein and sell it, use it for extortion, or use it to deny the reformed ex-con underclass access to housing, jobs and credit.

lozenge• 5 years ago

I suspect any professional law office that needs to research precedent, any legal journalist, etc will quickly exceed the $30/month. But yes, for normal people engaging in democracy it's effectively free.

LorenPechtel3• 5 years ago

The pricing is per page, not per document. One larger document can go over the free threshold.

kevinsundar• 5 years ago

The CBO’s cost Dec. 2020 estimate to build the new system was in the mid-two-digit millions, though given the fees that the AO is collecting from power users and agencies, the appropriation would more likely need to be in the single-digit millions, at most.

What? Double digit millions for a CRUD app for public information?

nojito2• 5 years ago

Because the scale of PACER is absolutely insane.

throwawaygh2• 5 years ago

Because the scale of PACER is absolutely insane.

...is it, though? It's fucking 2021. Interns play with petabytes. Literally.

CRUD on massive datasets is not a hard problem anymore. Or, at least, isn't eight digits and 10 years hard.

ncphil• 5 years ago

PACER should have been free from the beginning. Gatekeeping legal information for profit (even if only used to supplement appropriations) isn't only a problem at the federal level. In many states you need a commercial subscription to even read court opinions and statutes, let alone search. Localities in most places rely on commercial publishers to archive the text of ordinances, which only those with ridiculously expensive subscriptions can access. The digitization of everything had just begun when I retired, but the handwriting was already on the wall. The contrast with the widespread availability of technical doc is staggering: and reminds me of why I changed careers.

javajosh• 5 years ago

The central dictum of the legal profession: "you will have to pry every piece of the leverage I have over you out of my cold, dead hands."

gnicholas• 5 years ago

"central dictum"

This is an interesting choice of terms, since in the legal world "dictum" typically refers to a statement included in a legal opinion that is not central to the court's holding (decision). The full name is "obiter dictum", meaning "something said in passing", but it's almost always just called "dictum" or "dicta" (plural).

So although the ordinary definition of "dictum" is akin to pronouncement/dictate, in the legal context, "dictum" is a term of derogation ("that's just dictum"). To a lawyer, "central dictum" would be a contradiction in terms. Of course, this isn't a legal forum, so there's nothing wrong with what you said. It just causes mental hiccups for those of us afflicted with a legal background!

cwkoss2• 5 years ago

A similar injustice is that many building codes are privately copyrighted AND enforced by law.

criddell8• 5 years ago

They are privately copyrighted because those organizations research and develop the codes which is a significant expense.

Since it's unlikely that taxpayers will accept paying for all of this stuff, the likely outcome is that specific code references will be removed from the law and replaced with an insurance requirement. And insurers are going to require the ferris wheel or elevator or boiler to comply with the same code that used to be in the law.

hyperbovine• 5 years ago

If you start dabbling in DIY remodeling you'll soon find yourself trying understand parts of the national electrical and plumbing codes. They actually remind me a lot of reading the C++XX standards--clearly the product of a ton of time and effort by a bunch really smart and experienced people. There's no way in hell an elected body could/should ever wrote those. So, while I'm not saying that the current system is ideal or even fair, there's absolutely a need to compensate somebody to write and maintain these standards.

reaperducer• 5 years ago

It's getting even worse than that. In some cities and counties, you have to pay to read real estate records online. Public documents that were free just a few years ago are now behind paywalls. Even though my tax dollars paid for these systems that were supposed to make the public documents public.

Want to read it for free? Come on down to the courthouse, fill out a paper form, and we'll find the right book for you. Also for a fee.

See also: GIS systems.

Infernal• 5 years ago

Yup. And then charge you a dollar a page to make copies.

CobrastanJorji2• 5 years ago

Technical docs are better but far from perfect. For example, could you please link me to a copy of the C++ standard? It's ISO/IEC 14882:2020, if that helps.

roblabla• 5 years ago

The drafts are available in openstd, both of older versions of the standard[0], and the next, upcoming version[1].

Those are not technically the actual standards, but they're pretty close. But yes, I too dislike the fact that ISO standards are paid for. You know what bugs me the most? ISO 9660, the standard behind the .iso file format. It's been published in 1988, and today still costs roughly 130EUR to buy...

[0] http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/standards

[1] https://github.com/cplusplus/draft

gred• 5 years ago

I think things are slowly moving in the right direction though, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_v._Public.Resource.Org....

ccleve3• 5 years ago

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts is obviously incompetent to carry out this work. Anyone who demands nine years to do this shouldn't be taken seriously.

All documents should simply be dumped into a common repository. S3 would do fine. Define some standards for common document metadata so each document is identified by case, author, type, etc. Enable S3 version histories.

Then create an API for creating cases and uploading documents. This will require some controls, logins, security, and some facility for billing users for filing fees. If the court just provides an API, they can stop there.

Private companies who want to provide a user interface to lawyers and the public can do so. I'm sure that more than a few will make searches and document downloads free.

And that's it. If the government would just get out of the way, this could be done in six months to a year and would be very, very cheap.

nojito2• 5 years ago

And that's it. If the government would just get out of the way, this could be done in six months to a year and would be very, very cheap.

Absolute nonsense. People continiously underestimate the scale in which external facing government offerings are.

wolverine8764• 5 years ago

This will require some controls, logins, security, and some facility for billing users for filing fees

Some? It's a very serious business with a lot of rules to implement.

If the government would just get out of the way, this could be done in six months to a year and would be very, very cheap.

Based on what?

ccleve3• 5 years ago

Based on my 40 years of experience as a software developer.

rz2k• 5 years ago

Aaron Swartz should be credited for his early activism in support of making this public good accessible.[1]

I suspect that it played a role in how vicious the prosecutor Carmen Ortiz was in United States v. Aaron Swartz, the later case about bulk downloading of research on JSTOR from the MIT library system, and which eventually lead to his suicide.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#PACER

newbamboo• 5 years ago

Was curious what that prosecutor had gotten up to. https://theintercept.com/2021/02/15/marty-walsh-aaron-swartz...

Live by the sword…

throwaway0a5e• 5 years ago

Her fatal mistake was not knowing that rubbing shoulders with people who operate on the national stage and having ambitions to be one of them herself meant she had to care about optics at that level. And driving a college kid to suicide over what's basically alleged petty theft is rather tactless in that context. Driving a college kid to suicide over allegations of what basically amounts giving "the system" the bird with a side of petty theft would have gone over just fine at the state level.

gamblor956• 5 years ago

The movement to make PACER free began long before Swartz, and his death almost a decade ago was not the catalyst for making it free now.

kragen3• 5 years ago

If this had passed fifteen years ago, the FBI would never have launched their investigation into Aaron Swartz, the one preceding the MIT prosecution. Maybe he'd still be alive.

the_optimist• 5 years ago

PACER explored new boundaries in regulatory capture “from the inside.” It is now all too obvious a trend to have taxpayers fund and mandate the development of an institution, then subsequently build a sinecure upon its rental to those same taxpayers. This kind of triple-dipping is grotesque, and never should have been allowed in the first place.

kingcharles5• 5 years ago

PACER's paywall is bullshit, but just to temper things it does allow you to download a certain amount for free. I think it might be something like $30 a month. All my requests usually come in under this amount.

What are the fees if you go to the courthouse? I've actually never been inside a federal courthouse despite litigating there for almost a decade. I assume they have an indigency application if you can't afford their fees - the state courts I've worked at do.

You have a 1st Amendment right to court documents (and usually a constitutional or statutory right under state laws too). I don't know exactly how fees interact with your 1st Am. right. I would imagine that if you wanted a lot of documents and couldn't afford them that your 1st Am. right would win if you sued for it.

kingcharles5• 5 years ago

I want to make one more comment and then I am done. Access to the federal court system is a bargain. An absolute bargain. You can usually file a case for about $350-400, and the fees are tempered or removed if you can prove indigency. You get a LOT for your money if your case is legitimate. You can potentially eat up hundreds of hours of court room (judge, clerk) time, which is clearly tens of thousands of dollars worth of work.

The court system is incredibly subsidized in the USA.

Shame about the lawyer fees....!

trhway• 5 years ago

Somewhen during this year Santa Clara Superior Court removed case documents from their online case access, now only dates and parties are available there. So much for the progress, and that in Silicon Valley :) During physical access to the case documents at the court building one is prohibited from using say phone or any other camera.

busymom02• 5 years ago

As someone who's gotten into reading law related stuff, this is amazing news.

AlbertCory3• 5 years ago

For reference: [1] shows the currently-free RECAP ("PACER" spelled backwards) listing for the Elizabeth Holmes / Theranos trial.

The way this works is: you install a Chrome extension which automatically uploads anything you get from PACER into a free archive.

How are they funded? I expect they're a 501(c)(3). So it's not a question of whether PACER can be free; it already is, partially.

As for patents: Google used to host all the patent files for free, and then someone complained that that gave them an unfair advantage (note: but what???), so now someone else hosts them for free.

So I don't think finding the funding is really much of an issue nowadays.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7185174/united-states-v...

kragen3• 5 years ago

The unfair advantage, I suspect, may have been that Google could look to see which patents were popular, or which ones were popular at a particular company, or which ones were becoming popular at a particular university. They already have that unfair advantage when it comes to search traffic, but reading a patent can expose you to treble damages for willful infringement.

AlbertCory3• 5 years ago

Yeah, no. I was in Google Patent Litigation. "Treble damages" is just something lawyers like to use to scare the engineers with.

Besides the "treble damages" urban legend (more on that below):

* G was putting the patents online as soon as the PTO made them available. There was no delay so G could mine them for those nuggets of valuable IP.

* There are no nuggets of valuable IP to be mined in patents.

* Even if there were, ideas are a dime a dozen. It's execution that matters.

* "Treble damages":

  * first of all, the plaintiff hires a "damages expert" to calculate a good number to ask for. These people make a lot of money. "Willfulness" as in "engineer reading a patent" does not even enter into it.

  * secondly, "willfulness" comes from the plaintiff writing a formal letter to the defendant informing them of the patent, and asking them to take a license. It's always from discussions with their lawyers, or maybe someone talking about it on email.

  * ask yourself: if it *were* from engineers *reading* a patent, how would they even know? From their own web logs? How would they know who at the defendant's company was reading it? Wouldn't that be obscured by the defendant's internet interface?

908B64B197• 5 years ago

I have to say that anything to increase court transparency and access to the general public is great.

The Rittenhouse trial really highlighted how crooked some prosecutors are (filing bogus charges that the judge ended up throwing out, trying to introduce evidence rejected by the court and withholding key evidence from the defense and even going as far as to try to deny the defendant his constitutional rights). The only reason the public got to see all that was because of unfiltered, democratic access thanks to television.

Now, how many innocent black men had the prosecution pull the exact same tricks and were bullied into taking a plea deal? When only "approved media organizations" can afford access to the court, we might never know.

jaybna• 5 years ago

State and local jurisdictions are even worse. It is nearly impossible to see what lawsuits someone has been involved with. I have no idea how anyone could truly do a national search of every county courthouse. All if them are behind paywalls or on paper.

0des• 5 years ago

In retrospect, bravo, it seems like common sense that things that the People pay for should be freely available, as they're the ones purchasing it ostensibly by paying taxes.

busymom02• 5 years ago

I hope that they also start talking about making the court trials public on live streams in federal cases. Currently only state cases are public streamed and even that's up to the discretion of the judge. Having live stream of all trials would be enormously beneficial to society.

pabs32• 5 years ago

A workaround that will be useful until this gets implemented:

https://free.law/recap https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/

JCM9• 5 years ago

It’s about time. You are charged fees to download files but once you do you could share them for free, post them anywhere and such since it’s public record. The search engine is also this horrendous contraption that charges you based on the number of search results returned.

The whole thing is a horror show and glad to see this on the path to being shut down for good. A public S3 bucket with logically named file prefixes and some simple search on top could literally replace this whole hot mess overnight.

User23• 5 years ago

This is nice. Something similar for state courts would be great too. One of the things I do when deciding on a doctor or lawyer or other professional who I'm otherwise not qualified to evaluate is check and see how many times they've been sued and for what.

a-dub2• 5 years ago

it does make me wonder how much semiprivate data exists in the archives that was largely kept private through obscurity and small barriers to access.

yes, court records are public records... but how much was allowed to go in unredacted knowing that no technology existed to scrape or search it effectively? would the behavior of the courts change with respect to what gets archived if every filed document were easily queried and reviewed by anyone?

a-dub2• 5 years ago

like, for example, does this increase the likelihood that a protected witness would be unmasked by a data mining blogger?

wly_cdgr• 5 years ago

You know a bill means nothing when no one votes against it

dfrey1• 5 years ago

Can someone familiar explain why the AO thinks it would take $2 BILLION and 9 years to implement? Similarly (on a significantly smaller scale), why would it take $XX Million and 3 years to implement?

From a total noobs perspective (mine), it seems that all they would have to do is remove the paywall; assumedly there was already a security review of the product, so this should involve removing blockers and not necessarily reimplementing the wheel.

Where do those numbers and estimates come from? They seem wildly inflated to someone not in the govt industry, but I assume (perhaps generously) that there is some internal logic behind it...

“Free PACER” bill advances through Senate judiciary unanimously

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