

Federal courts make it more expensive to access records (PACER update) - grellas
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110915/11303415963/federal-courts-making-it-more-expensive-to-access-records-even-as-theyre-swimming-cash.shtml

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petrilli
Only when it assists in denying the public visibility into the operation of
the government do things in the tech world get MORE expensive over time.

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kbatten
Well that and transfer caps from ISPs getting lower (or more expensive for the
same cap) over time.

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suking
I don't even get how they can charge for these public records. They should be
free. I wonder if a lawyer could sue to make them free???

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sp332
They're not charging for the records, they're charging for _use_ of the PACER
system.. It's supposed to cover the cost of serving up the documents, but
there's a huge surplus. [http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/news/2011/09/federal-cour...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/news/2011/09/federal-courts-jack-up-fees-for-online-access-
by-25-percent.ars) It's not like they're claiming the documents are
copyrighted or anything.

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jcrites
Does this mean that I could download each document out of PACER once, and
publish it to a world-readable Amazon S3 bucket? (The type where each user
pays their own S3 costs to download from it)

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r00fus
There is a firefox extension that does something similar:
<https://www.recapthelaw.org/>

However, the gov is not amused:
<http://www.pacer.gov/announcements/general/exemptnotice.html>

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sp332
So, as long as you pay the fee _once_ , they don't mind. But the ToS of the
fee exemption says you lose your exemption when you use RECAP. That's not
great, but it doesn't mean that they object to normal use of RECAP.

