
Finishing what Aaron Swartz started with PACER - thinkcomp
https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-January/006578.html
======
Irregardless
I hate to rock the bandwagon, but this will accomplish nothing and it's pretty
tactless. As rayiner has already pointed out, PACER is a source of court
documents, not case law. 99% of the public would have no use for PACER
documents even if they had completely free, open access. The people who truly
have a legitimate need to access PACER documents are able to afford the fees,
although that still doesn't mean the current fee structure is justified or
fair.

Many lawyers who use PACER also rely heavily on the fact that it's updated
almost immediately -- a project like this could never accomplish that, and
could lead to malpractice if used in its place. For example, you can't sue
people for certain things if they've declared bankruptcy, so you need a
reliable, up-to-date way to verify they haven't (a common strategy is to wait
until the last minute to file bankruptcy just to delay legal proceedings).

What's worse is that this project seems to be encouraging some kind of witch
hunt:

> Now he wants to make "every U.S. Attorney and AUSA's full career as a
> prosecutor available to the public to examine in its entirety." So those are
> the links queued up in Project Asymptote.

That's how you want to honor Aaron? By using PACER and an army of volunteers
to pursue someone's personal vendetta? I can't even begin to describe how
tasteless that is; to take one of Aaron's projects and turn it into some kind
of misguided inquisition, then call it a "poetic tribute to Aaron Swartz's
memory".

If you really want to make court documents available to everyone for free,
then do that. Don't use Aaron as an excuse to target US prosecutors.

~~~
detst
> 99% of the public wouldn't know what to do with PACER

99% of the public wouldn't know what to do with the YouTube API[1] but the
fact that it's readily accessible means the 1% can do interesting things for
the 99%. Don't be so presumptuous about the value of this information being
freely available. Neither you nor I can envision all of the possible use
cases.

[1] Replace with government data, open source code, etc.

~~~
Irregardless
My point was that PACER documents are not inherently useful to the public --
edited to make that more clear.

Several people have already pointed out that there are also malicious uses for
this data that could negatively impact normal people. Do you want all your
neighbors and potential employers to know you've filed for bankruptcy? And
would you want to give them completely open access to all court filings in
your name?

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>Do you want all your neighbors and potential employers to know you've filed
for bankruptcy? And would you want to give them completely open access to all
court filings in your name?

Isn't that a completely separate question? You can argue that things like that
should be sealed, but if they're not sealed then they're a matter of public
record and the government should publish them for free on the internet.

------
anon_pariah
I've yet to hear why the nominal 10c/pp charge is too onerous. If this
information was truly no cost, it will likely become subject to abuse.

I went through personal bankruptcy in 2009 and my personal history is
available through pacer. I'm not proud of what I went through, and it was my
own fault, but I at least take some solace in knowing that in order for
scammers to access my information, they will have had to cull through many
thousands of other cases at a cost of hundreds of dollars.

Perhaps the answer then is to allow PACER access at public libraries without
cost - having the access based on a physical location may help reduce the
speed with which $criminal_element can build their portfolio.

~~~
thinkcomp
"Ten cents doesn't seem like much, but when you consider that an average court
case consists of thousands of pages of text in PDF files, those dimes add up
rather quickly. When you further consider that in the course of prosecuting
one's own court case, one must refer to many, many other cases because of the
nature of legal precedent, legal research can suddenly cost thousands of
dollars—and that's without even hiring an overpriced lawyer."

<http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=84>

------
hect0r
Why do people believe that this data is a "public good"? In the case of
disputes between individuals, such as divorce, I do not accept that this
information belongs to the general public and must be "emancipated". On the
contrary, I believe that this is owned by the individual participants in the
case and not the government or public. Only if they collectively agree to
publish this material should it be available in public. There is no moral
justification for the wholesale distribution and publication of material
relating to other people's private lives and affairs.

~~~
darkarmani
> There is no moral justification for the wholesale distribution and
> publication of material relating to other people's private lives and
> affairs.

Should state recognized marriage be considered something that is considered
private? If you want public recognition of your marriage it makes sense that
it isn't private.

~~~
hect0r
A marriage is a private contract between consenting parties just like any
other. The state should not get involved.

~~~
darkarmani
Maybe that is how it should be, but that isn't how it is right now.

If you don't want public recognition of your marriage, I'm sure you could
write up some private contracts, but it won't confer all of the same rights
that a state-recognized marriage gets.

------
fnordfnordfnord
Another HN user kindly pointed out to me in a related thread that the Gov't
has modified their terms to specifically prohibit the use of RECAP.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059847>

~~~
danielweber
That is incorrect based on PACER's own words. PACER has a free version, but
the free version limits your ability to transfer to other bodies. Although I'm
sure that gets people freaking out, that's hardly RECAP being "prohibited."

But, really, even with a 100% populated RECAP, all lawyers use PACER for their
real work. The fact that any joker in the world can upload documents to RECAP
makes it unsuitable for anything you are going to put before a judge. RECAP is
fine for bloggers, though.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Here, in PACER's own words.
<http://www.pacer.gov/announcements/general/exemptnotice.html> "A fee
exemption applies only for limited purposes. Any transfer of data obtained as
the result of a fee exemption is prohibited unless expressly authorized by the
court. Therefore, fee exempt PACER users must refrain from the use of RECAP.
The prohibition on transfer of information received without fee is not
intended to bar a quote or reference to information received as a result of a
fee exemption in a scholarly or other similar work. "

~~~
esurc
I read that to apply to a "fee exempt user" -- one of a very narrow class of
persons exempt from fees, no matter how much they download.

A regular user who happens to download less than $15.00 per month is not a
fee-exempt user. They are someone for whom, in the words of the website, "fees
are waived for that quarter."

[See this page and look at the questions "How much does PACER cost?" and "Can
the user fee be waived?": <http://www.pacer.gov/psc/faq.html> ]

~~~
cfield
I think this is correct.

The Judicial Conference of the United States determines the PACER fees and
appears to draw a distinction between the quarterly "fee waiver" available to
all accounts and a "fee exemption" granted by a court after making the
requisite findings (e.g., exemption is necessary to avoid unreasonable burdens
and to promote public access to information, research is for academic/non-
commercial use, etc.).

Sources:

Reports of the Proceedings of the Judicial Conference of the United States at
[http://www.uscourts.gov/FederalCourts/JudicialConference/Pro...](http://www.uscourts.gov/FederalCourts/JudicialConference/Proceedings.aspx)

March 14, 2001: "no fee … [will] be owed until an individual … accrue[s]
charges of more than $10 in a calendar year. … providing a basic level of
public access consistent with the services historically provided by the
courts."

March 16, 2010: "In order to encourage use of … PACER … by the public, … users
[will] not be billed until their accounts total[] at least $10 in a one-year
period. To increase the amount of data available without charge … users [will]
be allowed to accrue $10 in free usage quarterly, instead of yearly, before
they would be charged."

September 13, 2011: "… the current waiver of fees of $10 or less in a
quarterly billing cycle be changed to $15 or less per quarter so that 75 to 80
percent of all users would still receive fee waivers"

September 23, 2003: "exemptions to the fee are only to be given upon a showing
of cause, are limited to specific categories of users, may be granted for a
specific period of time, may be revoked at the discretion of the court, and
are only for access related to the purpose for which the exemption was given."

March 15, 2011: The Electronic Public Access (EPA) Fee Schedule provides for
exemptions … upon a showing that an exemption is necessary to avoid
unreasonable burdens and to promote public access to information. … [T]he
Conference approved, a modification of the EPA fee schedule to include the
following sentence: “For individual researchers, courts must also find that
the defined research project is intended for academic research purposes, and
not for commercial purposes or internet redistribution.”

------
animalmom
This is a bit of plug, but last summer I worked on a project that required
PACER documents to identify judges who heard cases involving companies they
owned stock in.

[http://cironline.org/reports/federal-
judge%E2%80%99s-rulings...](http://cironline.org/reports/federal-
judge%E2%80%99s-rulings-favored-companies-which-he-owned-stock-4030)

My colleague and I applied for a fee exemption as my employer, The Center for
Investigative Reporting, is a non profit. We were able to examine enough PACER
records to identify several judges with conflicts of interest but our work was
cut short when our fee waiver was revoked. The waiver was revoked because we
are members of the media (though we disclosed this in our application).

[http://californiawatch.org/money-and-politics/pacer-
federal-...](http://californiawatch.org/money-and-politics/pacer-federal-
court-record-fees-exceed-system-costs-18685)

Our lawyers are appealing the case which could lead to more open access to
PACER and allow us to continue searching for conflicts of interest across the
nation. If you support Swartz's efforts consider donating so we might continue
our investigation.

<https://donate.centerforinvestigativereporting.org>

------
jstalin
As a user of PACER, it's very frustrating. $0.10 per "page" is total BS, since
most federal filings are done electronically anyways. There is very little
marginal cost for me to download a PDF from their servers.

I wouldn't mind paying a flat monthly fee for access as opposed to the current
fee schedule. PACER is definitely getting further and further behind the
times. It seems designed to discourage use by its own users.

------
rayiner
Much of this is quite uninformed, which makes me question the value of Mr.
Foster's other points.

> What other options are out there for accessing federal case law?

Mr. Foster seems confused. PACER is a system for accessing court dockets, not
a repository of case law. You can think of court docket's as a court's
"inbox." When the parties file a complaint, motion, or brief, or when the
judge issues an interlocutory order or other memorandum, it goes in the
docket. Court dockets are mostly concerned with the mechanics of a single case
--they are not intended to be a source of law.

> Open government pioneer Carl Malamud says commercial ventures such as Lexis-
> Nexis, West Law, and Bloomberg Law compete for a $6.5 billion market built
> around extracting rents from this public commons:

Mr. Foster completely mischaracterizes what Lexis and West do. These services
do not charge you for access to the case law, which are in the public domain.
What they do is provide a value-added service on top of the publicly available
case law. They have armies of legally-trained professionals who read cases as
they come out and annotate them with "head notes" which give summaries of the
case and index the case into Lexis's or West's legal ontology. E.g. if I'm
thinking of using a case to support a proposition, I can log on to West Law
and have it give me a report of all the cases that cite that one. The report
not only gives me a simple "citation list" like you can get with Google
scholar, but a summary of the contexts in which each case was cited, whether
it was referenced in a positive or negative light, and how extensively it was
discussed. They can do this because they have (expensive) human readers who go
through the cases to generate this meta-data.[1]

This is not "extracting rents from the public commons." This is charging for
the valuable service of organizing and summarizing publicly available
information.

There are legitimate complaints about access to case law. While all federal
courts that I'm aware of freely post their opinions on their websites (e.g.
<http://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/recentop/week/recprec.htm>), the same isn't true
for all state courts. But as a practical matter that's a state-by-state issue
--the federal government doesn't have much say in the internal administration
of the state courts. Going after PACAR while completely ignoring that much
more pressing problem smacks of not understanding the underlying issue (to be
charitable), or going after the federal system because it's guaranteed to
generate more outrage on the internet (to be less charitable).

[1] Note that there is a ton of money to be made "disrupting" this industry
through automation. To date, nobody has succeeded in building anything close
to being as sophisticated as Lexis and Westlaw. Google Scholar is a pale
imitation (to the point of not even being the same kind of product) that's
only good for doing a bit of quick background research to save time and fees
before you log onto Lexis or Westlaw.

~~~
keithwinstein
I think you may have misunderstood the criticism. Yes, of course Lexis and
Westlaw provide digital copies of case reporters. But they also do a ton of
other stuff. One of their extremely expensive services allows you to watch
state and federal court dockets and get a notification about new entries.

Published cases themselves are in relatively good shape -- most of what you
can find in the West National Reporter system over the last 50 years is
available for free on Google Scholar.

In response to your, "These services do not charge you for access to the case
law, which are in the public domain." Sure they do. It costs money to buy the
West Federal Supplement or Tennessee Reports in print. It also costs money to
access those reporters online, via Westlaw or Lexis-Nexis. Many of these old
cases (despite being uncopyrighted) are only available by visiting a law
library or a paid online service. You can't just download them for free.

~~~
igurari
You're correct that Rayiner's statement that Westlaw/Lexis don't charge for
access to case law is wrong. But he is right about the broader point that they
do provide some value-add, and that value-add is why people continue to use
their service.

With the entry of Google Scholar, the access and value-add businesses are
divorced. The cost of the underlying access has reached zero. But the reason
Westlaw and Lexis are still huge is because they do provide value-adds.

So this talk of opening up PACER is really missing the broader access point -
the opinion access problem is largely solved via Google Scholar. PACER
documents may be opened up, but they are not useful to lawyers in anything
other than some basic docket scenarios.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>So this talk of opening up PACER is really missing the broader access point -
the opinion access problem is largely solved via Google Scholar.

Yes and no. Suppose I want to take a stab at automating Westlaw. Now I need to
download all of the court opinions ever so that I can put them in my database
and use them to train my machine learning algorithm. Can I actually get them
for any reasonable price? All of them? And without doing something that will
get me charged with unauthorized access to a computer like Aaron? Because if
not, fixing that is a legitimate goal. (And if so, do post the link.)

~~~
igurari
The distinction here is between you as _the public_ trying to understand the
law, and you as _a businessperson_ trying to make money off of the law. The
push to open up PACER is based on ideals about the former, not the latter.
(And the former is Google Scholar Legal's Raison d'être.)

Certainly it will be great to have free access to the data in bulk, and that
day will come. But from a practical perspective, the barrier to entry as _a
businessperson_ in this space is not data. There is enough data at
<https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/> to experiment with. And if your
experiments work, there are companies that will sell you access to all the
data.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
I don't know if you can distinguish the two so easily. You can't really expect
the government to provide a slick interface or make the data easy to use. It's
well outside of the court system's core competency. But if you make the raw
data easily accessible then it creates the possibility for entrepreneurs to do
something innovative with it, which leads to the public benefit.

Heck, that's pretty much where Lexis and West came from so long ago, but now
technology is offering the possibility (at least in theory) to democratize the
process so that someone can screw around with the data over a weekend or three
and see if they can create something worth following up before they go through
the trouble of looking for funding in order to buy data.

I don't know if we're even particularly arguing about anything. Is there
really an argument to be made that this data should not be freely available?
If "that day will come" then I guess all I'm saying is that sooner is better
than later.

~~~
igurari
There may not be a disagreement: I'm not arguing that this data should be
closed. I believe it should be freely available, and should be freely
available in bulk form.

My only point was that providing open access to cases so that individuals can
learn the law is a solved problem via Google Scholar. Bulk access _is not a
problem for individuals_. I say this as someone who has worked to create
better legal research tools for nearly 5 years: the first 2 on a startup that
failed, the next 1 at Scholar, and the last 1.5 on a new startup that I
believe will finally succeed.

So while the desire to open up PACER - and the attention given to it - is
great, I don't think it will have any effect on the future of individual
access to law, or to the future of innovation and business in the legal space.
I don't think lack of innovation _today_ has anything to do with lack of bulk
access _today_. I think the deficiencies are more a reflection of the fact
that innovation in this space is really hard.

------
tlrobinson
Why doesn't the government just make dumps of all documents available either
by BitTorrent for free or on a hard drive at cost, and let the free market
decide how much to charge (or not) for access?

~~~
afarrell
Because they want to maintain a high-availability online system, not one where
you have to wait for physical media in the mail or for someone to seed. How
many law firms do you think would bother to use BitTorrent?

~~~
tlrobinson
My point was 3rd parties could provide the same service cheaper. The gov could
continue to run PACER as it currently is too.

------
ByronWarnken
Every state and the Feds should have what Maryland has.
[http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/inquiry/inquiry-
index.j...](http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/inquiry/inquiry-index.jsp)

Its all cases, online. People should be able to do what they wish with the
data.

I, for one, have turned it into a business ranking lawyers.
<http://www.injurylawyerdatabase.com>.

This isn't going to be okay until we accept nothing less than a feed from all
judicial data sources.

Sometimes it's evasion. Mostly, governments are inept. Stop looking at this
from a sinister standpoint. The business is in helping governments get the
data online in an acceptable fashion while complying with all appropriate
laws.

Maryland's system should be a dinosaur. Instead, it's cutting edge. That's a
situation that will be fixed. By whom? By you. Isn't this some sort of
rockstar tech company launching pad?

------
afarrell
Records access, storage and collection are not free. The network connections
are also expensive. PACER has redundant commercial network connections to over
2000 courthouse locations. Although costs have come down, this system
aggregates data from 94 separate districts, including Puerto Rico, Guam,
Hawaii and the Northern Mariana Islands. It is triple redundant, so that the
systems can survive any natural disaster. After Hurricane Sandy, records were
still available and the courts were open for electronic filing even though the
buildings were flooded and off the grid. These systems are far more expensive
than a simple FTP server; they serve terabytes of data. The Federal Courts are
open 24/7 for electronic filing, one of the more accessible government
agencies in the world.

PACER charges a fee to maintain the systems that support public access and
improve IT services in the Federal Courts. It is very similar to using fishing
license fees to support fisheries or drivers license fees to maintain the DMV.
User fees are an important way to maintain systems separate from a reliance on
the political system. PACER fees are the only fees coming into the Federal
Courts that are not appropriated by Congress. Most of the fees are collected
from the law firms that practice in Federal Court.

One could argue that the funds to run PACER should in fact rely on the
political system and come from congress. If you want to change this, contact
the members of the House judiciary committee (<http://judiciary.house.gov/>)
and lobby them. However, the federal courts have not actually received a
budget since September and are under a lot of stress to keep running despite
this.

One could argue that PACER should be charging 5 to 7 cents per page rather
than 10 and should not be generating money for general court IT projects. But
be aware that these projects are not frivolous. They save significant amounts
of time for the litigants. Given the high cost of legal services, this helps
reduce financial the burden on both prosecution and defense.

With a cost of 10 cents per page up to a maximum of 3 dollars per document,
the implicit comparison to a journal subscription which costs hundreds of
dollars is specious. Also, this fee is waived if an individual's costs are
less than $15. The OP acknowledges, "That means that any individual using
PACER can download 150 pages every quarter for free." So the system is already
free for anyone who is making casual use of it. There are also academic and
financial-hardship waivers available. I argue, as many on HN have done about
free-of-charge web services run by companies, that those who rely on a system
in order to do business should pay for its upkeep in order to make sure the
system stays around.

Where does RECAP's funding come from? What standards of availability does it
guarantee? If it succeeds in serving most documents but without an
availability or document authenticity guarantee, what has been accomplished
but a degradation of service? If this diverts most funding away from PACER and
makes it harder to maintain reliably, will that actually increase public
access to court records? Will that actually contribute to a more just world?

As rayiner points out, state courts do not make their documents available
nearly as freely as the federal court does. While that is separate from the
argument over whether it is right to maintain PACER the way the court does, it
does indicate that effort spent to increase access toward court records would
be better allocated toward state courts.

Also, one could argue that PACER's UI could be better. This is true. Anyone
want to put together a proposal?

~~~
pyre
Someone looked it up in a previous thread a week or so ago. IIRC, the PACER
system had ~80-90 million in revenues, and $25 million in costs last year. I
remember the discussion mentioning that all of the extra cash goes towards
making up for a lack of proper budget from Congress for running the court
system. It's a complicated issue.

Edit:

Looked up the posts:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5053611>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5053483>

------
halfninety
Aside from other considerations, I'm afraid that abusing a good move (the $15
waiver) will discourage similar moves in the future.

------
spinlocked
Stanford Vs MIT

When MIT makes education widely available you get "open courseware" notes and
unstructured videos.

When Stanford makes education widely available you get coursra and udacity.

When MIT is presented with Aaron Swartz you get unfair prosecution.

When Stanford is presented with Aaron Swartz you get PACER.

Hmm.

~~~
homosaur
Ha! Alum much?

------
OGinparadise
Not sure making everything accessible via a Google search is liberating.
People should have a right to move on, not have everything they did or said a
few decades ago in depositions, lawsuits, bankruptcy, divorce or whatever on
top of a Google search. Imagine your prospective employer searching for "your
name" and reading what your ex-wife, landlord...said about you in a court
case.

~~~
jlgreco
You know what I would do if I was googling a potential employee and came
across divorce documents?

Hit the back button.

Not out of some respect of privacy, but because reading that seems like an
extremely boring waste of my time. Maybe I'm weird like that.

~~~
mpyne
I don't like pepper, but I don't expect the pepper industry to disappear
overnight.

Or in other words, I don't know why your personal experience is relevant to
the parent comment, there's entire entertainment industries that are funded by
gossip and gossip alone so obviously there _are_ people out there who would
care about that kind of thing.

~~~
jlgreco
Yeah, people dig celebrity gossip, but does it follow that HR is going to be
interested in Joe Smoes divorce five years ago? I don't think so, particularly
when they are looking at dozens of Joes a day. It would be a waste of their
time to read that stuff, and boring to boot.

Sure, someone out there will probably do it, but I just can't wrap my mind
around this becoming a pandemic.

~~~
mpyne
HR isn't the concern. If it's public, _anyone_ who gives a shit about that
kind of stuff can find it, usually with just a simple focused Google search.

It used to be that you had to hire a private detective to find dirt on
people... I get that Google is going to make that easier but we don't have to
go out of our way to help that along. :)

~~~
jlgreco
Can't you just pay 10 cents per page for this stuff right now? I don't think
using a suboptimal non-google search should present _that_ much of a hardship.
I don't really see this being a game changer for someone who just wants to
smear a particular person; only if you need a very large amount of documents
(in other words, are using it for its intended purpose.)

~~~
mpyne
The difference between "free" and 10 cents is quite stark. That's the famous
problem holding back microtransactions in general.

------
spigoteater
I see walls of text on a place called Hacker News taking issue with free
information.

Free information and damn the consequences.

~~~
mpyne
"Kill them all; Let God sort them out"

