
PACER Fetch APIs - danso
https://free.law/2019/11/05/announcing-our-new-pacer-fetch-apis/
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mlissner
Thanks for posting this! I'm the executive director of Free Law Project. If
anybody has any questions or comments, I'm happy to chat!

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mCOLlSVIxp6c
Have you considered allowing people to "donate" their PACER accounts up to the
free limit so that CourtListener could download documents directly without
relying on a RECAP or API user to do it? With enough free accounts you might
be able to start downloading every document in every case.

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mlissner
We're thinking about that, actually! There are a couple hard parts though:

1\. How do you know which documents to buy with the donated credits?

2\. How do you get access to the user's account? Do you store their password
somewhere?

Maybe a simple trick would be to throw a little alert with the extension
around the end of the quarter just to say, "Hey, it's the end of the quarter.
Have you spent your entire free budget?"

Hm. There's an opportunity here, but we've never quite nailed it down.

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toomuchtodo
1\. Whatever docs your org feels have the highest value at that time.

2\. The user provides their creds and you store them in Hashicorp Vault, AWS
Param Store, or another secrets manager, and then retrieve them for use in
making requests with a queue and runner mechanism.

If you have questions about this, email in profile. Last job was somewhere
making requests for users with their creds at scale, currently in infosec. I
would love to help make all PACER docs freely available.

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CalRobert
For anyone curious, this is part of a broader project to democratize access to
often difficult-to-obtain or paywalled court opinions across many different
jurisdictions, among other things.

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applecrazy
Potentially stupid question: why is this a paid thing at all? Aren't court
dockets public information?

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MaupitiBlue
They are public. You can always go to the courthouse and use one of the
computers to download documents for free.

Also, PACER bills quarterly, and your first $50 is free. Of course, if you are
a party to the case, you can download for free as well.

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CobrastanJorji
Viewing them is free. Printing them is not. Also, you're assuming that the
public access terminal is a computer. In some places, the "terminals" are
human clerks, and the turnaround for searches are days to weeks.

And only the first $15 is free, but if you spend $16, you get charged the
whole $16, not $1.

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equivocates
The RECAP project is a great project, and highly recommend its use.

But PACER charges 10 cents per page for access and I don't have a problem with
that. These fees keep the federal courts open to do vital business when
Congress decides it's a good time for a shutdown. Any complaints re: PACER
fees should be directed to Congress.

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nkw
There are much better ways for the judiciary to maintain their finances than
relying on arbitrary non-cost based fees for public access to public
information. Judiciary funding is around $7 billion/year. Pacer makes maybe
$150 million/year. Agree that Congress should fix Pacer fees, but the
judiciary is not free from blame here.

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patentatt
I agree. I think it’s a travesty all court documents aren’t mandated to be
freely accessible.

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toomuchtodo
Call your congressional representative. Ask them to sponsor legislation to
remove pay access to PACER.

