
National Day of PACER Protest - gbotelho
https://yo.yourhonor.org/
======
ChuckMcM
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because of outdated tools and unreliable systems.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...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-service)

~~~
hackuser
Does the Digital Service do work for the Judicial Branch? I assumed it only
does projects for the Executive Branch.

Certainly every branch could use a Digital Service.

~~~
thinkcomp
No.

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rayiner
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?

~~~
jsmthrowaway
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.

~~~
istjohn
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.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
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.

------
hackuser
Carl Malamud might get more support for this idea if he could boil it down to
fewer than 61 paragraphs.

~~~
Titanous
Here are some shorter/alternative takes on the situation:

[http://freelawproject.org/2015/03/20/what-is-the-pacer-
probl...](http://freelawproject.org/2015/03/20/what-is-the-pacer-problem/)

[http://qz.com/283772/why-pacer-should-and-should-not-be-
like...](http://qz.com/283772/why-pacer-should-and-should-not-be-like-edgar/)

[https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/sjs/making-excuses-for-
fe...](https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/sjs/making-excuses-for-fees-on-
electronic-public-records/)

There are many more if you take time to peruse the Re: PACER document and
click through the citations.

~~~
josinalvo
Using PACER: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA4Z9LEJSBw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA4Z9LEJSBw)

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hackuser
This needs a more descriptive title. It give readers little indication of what
this is about.

How about: "National Day of PACER Protest - Carl Malamud, Public.Resource.Org"

~~~
gbotelho
updated!

------
thinkcomp
For reasons I don't fully understand Carl left out the only lawsuit ever to
directly challenge PACER fees, which I filed recently:

[http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california-
northe...](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california-northern-
district-court/think-computer-foundation-et-al-v-administrative-office-of-the-
united-states-courts-et-al/)

------
Animats
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.

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rando289
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.

------
yuhong
Thinking about it, the charging of search results are what bothers me the
most, as it creates perverse incentives.

