
Bill to tear down federal courts’ paywall gains momentum in Congress - rbanffy
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/bill-to-tear-down-federal-courts-paywall-gains-momentum-in-congress/
======
joncrane
I've been trying to look at the court filings over the lawsuit to extend
Census data collection.

I got 3/4 of the way through registering for PACER before I gave up.

Apparently it's 10 cents per page, and if you incur less than $3 of charges in
a quarter, you won't be billed.

But you still have to provide your credit card to get access.

~~~
afarrell
PACER's UX is pretty bad.

Convincing organisations that their UX is pretty bad is...hard.

~~~
vonmoltke
Especially government organizations who have a monopoly on the access or
functionality the interface provides.

~~~
ChrisSD
UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) team has a different approach. In 2014
they undertook a redesign of all UK government sites with an emphasis on being
usable for everyone. At the time it was controversial (see el reg
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9067984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9067984))
but it's been widely lauded since.

See also their design principles:

[https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-
principles](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles)

------
supernova87a
Aside from courtlistener.com, can anyone remind me, what is that site that
acts like Scihub for legal briefs and opinions/decisions?

I will say that something really shoddy about newspaper journalism on most
court-related topics is that they never give the reader the actual case
reference to go read about. As if the reporter is the last authoritative
interpreter about the subject, and there isn't a mountain of readily
accessible info to read more about it.

------
Dodge54
Honestly, PACER is the least offensive docketing system I’ve used in the US,
especially given that the charge for each document is capped $3. State court
systems are worse.

Delaware charges around $40 to search for a case, and then charges $10 for
each document you pull. And don’t get me started on how terrible California is
since each county has their own docketing system, and many still only have
paper filing. It’s a joke that you still have to send a runner to a court in
Silicon Valley to file or pull a document.

------
afarrell
Organisations generally strive to have multiple sources of revenue so that
they can continue to pay salaries despite interruptions in one source.

This also applies to the Federal Courts, which do not have any one source of
funding they see as stable[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_United_State...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_United_States_federal_government_shutdown)

~~~
R0b0t1
This was used against them in a previous ruling (CA?). The ruling stated the
funds need to only be used to maintain the access system, not anything else.

------
PaulHoule
Oddly the last person who "gets" the imperative of getting access to the law
for free is a lawyer.

------
mmrezaie
I do not know how to research this, but what is the status on EU? How EU does
this? I know that in Sweden it is only one email and you can get any public
document. Even the emails of publicly funded positions.

~~~
lawtalkinghuman
All EU legislation (Treaties, Directives, Regulations etc.) and case law
(decisions of the Court of Justice, and the GC & CST) are up on a website
called EUR-LEX, usually in both HTML and PDF, and in every official language
of the EU (at the time that the legislation or decision was made—earlier
documents aren't retroactively translated into languages of countries that
have joined subsequently).

[https://eur-lex.europa.eu/](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/)

Example of a CJEU decision: [https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:61...](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:61978CJ0120)

Example of legislative text (a Directive): [https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32013L0048)

If you are comparing it with PACER, there are some differences - PACER
contains loads more documents than you get on EUR-LEX including lots of
procedural stuff, filings, and so on, while EUR-LEX only tends to have the
court opinion, the Advocate-General opinion, and maybe a bit of procedural
stuff, but not much else.

This is because the CJEU is in practice a court that only deals with matters
of law that have been referred from a national court (or from another EU
institution, like the Commission). Comparing the CJEU and a US federal
district court is comparing apples with oranges.

~~~
jcranmer
If you compare to the US Supreme Court, note that all of the filings at that
level are available for free. See, e.g.,
[https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/...](https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/18-956.html).

------
s1artibartfast
Hopefully we can tear down the paywall or federally enforceable laws next. It
is a travesty that laws can be passed for compliance with proprietary
standards which are not accessible to the public.

------
OldHand2018
We should not forget that this paywall exists only because Congress forced it
to exist.

~~~
mmcconnell1618
From the article is sounds like several commercial services (like background
checks) are using this data in very high volume. The charges may simply have
been put in place to offset the cost of serving these high volume customers.

Should the US government subsidize the commercial interests by providing
unlimited access for free? Or, is it their duty to provide the information for
free to any citizen or US company as a function of the government?

~~~
gruez
Sibling comments already mentioned that it's free individuals if your volume
is low enough. They charge 10 cents per page and if your quarterly charges
don't exceed $30, you don't get billed. That works out to around 300 "free"
pages per quarter per person.

------
zxcvbn4038
This is probably a good development overall but I'd be concerned that the data
ends up in Equifax or Transunion. For years they reported erroneously that I
had numerous tax liens against me, the only reason it ever got resolved is
that laws were changed so that they had to verify the SSN and DOB and since
the courts did not provide that information they had to drop them. Who knows
what will end up in my report if they are free to scrape all of the judgements
and do the same lackluster job of matching them to people.

