

Supreme Court, in Big Leap, Plans to Put Filings Online - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/us/politics/supreme-court-plans-to-provide-briefs-and-filings-electronically.html

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rab_oof
The article begs the question: Will it be completely free or behind yet
another artificial but officially-sanctioned paywall and login like PACER.gov?
The article clearly didn't any meaningful research because PACER and similar
state/federal outsourced/homegrown paywalls are bullshit, and likely why
SCOTUS advocated a separate system. The key is whether it will truly provide
free and open access to decisions and documents. If not, it would be another
Not Invented Here duplication of PACER. (Let's assume it won't be as crappy as
PACER, because SCOTUS is presumed to contain a measure of common-sense.)

The bigger meta question is: why are courts still allowed to monetize the
automated services that are provided at neglible unit cost? Just because
lawyers are often chisels doesn't mean the government is allowed to profit
from the restriction of access to the people's information, and that automated
processes (downloading PDFs) are no longer equivocable to manually making
copies of thousands of pages of documents. This puts an undue burden on most
people that don't have millions of dollars to throw around and it puts up a
barrier to actual transparency of legal artifacts. These sorts of things
should be free, but the article does neither explicitly state nor implicitly
hint to the cost of this yet-to-be-named SCOTUS system.

Even more meta: Shouldn't civil rights include the freedom to access all
public information produced by a government with minimal (at cost of delivery)
or no cost?

(IANALBIPOOTI)

------
thinkcomp
This is a positive development overall--likely in response to pressure from
Senator Leahy, who chairs (or is about to have chaired?) the Senate Judiciary
Committee--but a lot of things make no sense.

\- Supreme Court documents will be free. That's great. But district and
appellate documents will still be $0.10 per page? Why? Both are public
information. Arguably if Supreme Court documents are _more_ important, then
they should be more valuable, and therefore more expensive. This is totally
inconsistent and no explanation is given.

\- Taxpayers now have to foot the bill (many tens of millions and counting)
for "NextGen" CM/ECF _and_ this supposed separate system for the Supreme Court
that will not be available until 2016. So far the only next-generation feature
released as part of NextGen CM/ECF is the ability to have one username and a
password you set yourself. For this we have paid many, many millions of
dollars over about five years.

\- Roberts cites procurement considerations to justify the totally
unacceptable delay in adopting technology. Yet where are the RFPs for NextGen
CM/ECF and the Supreme Court's docketing system? Why, they're nowhere to be
found, either because they don't exist or they're not publicly available.

\- Roberts argues that the courts have an obligation to avoid jumping on
technological bandwagons too quickly. Perhaps that's prudent. He fails,
however, to address courts using technology as a weapon against the poor. See
[http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20130217/petitioning-r...](http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20130217/petitioning-
rube-goldbergs-supreme-court/).

\- Paper filing will still be required. Why?

Fundamentally Roberts' views on technology are a reflection of the views of
the profession that created him. Lawyers generally do not believe that they
are subject to the same forces as the rest of the world, technological forces
included. Roberts posits in his report that technologies "come and go." Well,
so do useless (and often harmful), self-important overpriced middlemen who
complicate processes that would frequently otherwise be just fine without
them.

Meanwhile, my lawsuit against the Administrative Office of the United States
Courts over these issues continues. See
[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/).

