
PlainSite bans federal courts from accessing court data - thinkcomp
http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/index.html?id=1&uscourts=1
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gamblor956
Much ado by tech guys who are complaining about a law they apparently have not
bothered to read. The courts are not required to provide _free_ public access
to court documents, they are simply cannot charge more than is necessary to
maintain the e-filing/docket system. See sec. 205 in the pdf linked by their
post.

~~~
thinkcomp
"We examined the Courts’ budget documents from the past few years, and we
discovered that the Courts claim PACER expenses of roughly $25 million per
year. But in 2010, PACER users paid about $90 million in fees to access the
system [5]."

[https://www.recapthelaw.org/2012/01/10/recap-featured-in-
xrd...](https://www.recapthelaw.org/2012/01/10/recap-featured-in-xrds-
magazine/)

I operate PlainSite on a budget of far less than $5,000 per year. It's far
more advanced than PACER in a number of ways. Even multiplying PlainSite's
budget by a factor of 100 to account for features that PACER has but PlainSite
does not, you still get pretty close to zero on a cost-per-page basis.

~~~
testing12341234
Maybe it would be helpful to modify "entitled free of charge on PACER" to a
phrasing that includes information about how the charges are unreasonable.

I happen to know that under the law, PACER access is not required to be "free
of charge", and thus the rest of the statement falls flat. Even though I agree
that PACER pricing is out of touch with the law due it's pricing being well
above the costs required to maintain the system.

While I'm not sure of your target audience with your statement, it's clear
that on some level federal employees of the court system are included. They
may also know "free of charge" is not what the law says, and thus it may also
undermine your argument with them as well.

~~~
thinkcomp
There is already a link in the statement to this letter, which is quite
detailed:

[http://www.thinkcomputer.org/20120209.pacer.pdf](http://www.thinkcomputer.org/20120209.pacer.pdf)

Furthermore, many at the courts have read this blog post:

[http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=84](http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=84)

They are well aware of what is going on.

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amckenna
Access is free if viewed from a federal courthouse terminal. While it's not
necessarily convenient it is worth mentioning that a free option exists.

[http://www.pacer.gov/documents/epa_feesched.pdf](http://www.pacer.gov/documents/epa_feesched.pdf)

~~~
thinkcomp
Not really. You can't save files and the courts I've been to charge $0.25 per
page to print if you can print at all.

~~~
gametheoretic
By 'save' do you mean locally, or do they also disallow email, dropbox, etc?
(I think it's great what you're doing regardless; I ask only to more clearly
assess their intentionality in all this...)

~~~
thinkcomp
The court workstations are Dell Optiplex machines running Firefox on Linux
configured to visit one and only one web site: PACER. The local filesystem is
locked.

~~~
gametheoretic
Jeeesus. So this ain't even a "don't hate the player" situation -- they _are_
the game?

------
fiatjaf
The man against the State.

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lim_nick
Posted by the same guy who invented facebook and mobile payments, people
should listen really closely to this genius!

~~~
leeoniya
spare us the ad hominem

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ceejayoz
I'm not sure it's entirely ad hominem to point out past PR stunts and quixotic
crusades.

