"Five years ago, in a post called “Making Excuses for Fees on Electronic Public Records,” I described my attempts to persuade the federal Judiciary to stop charging for access to their web-based system, PACER (“Public Access to Court Electronic Records”). Nearly every search, page view, and PDF download from the system incurs a fee ranging from 10 cents to $3 (or, in some cases, much more). I chronicled the many excuses that the courts have provided for charging what amounts to $150 million in fees every year for something that should—by all reasonable accounts—not cost much to provide."
Related Paper:
"The Price of Ignorance: The Constitutional Cost of Fees for Access to Electronic Public Court Records"
"This paper examines the public’s interest in free electronic access to federal court records and considers the relative strength of legal and policy arguments to the contrary. Part I performs an accounting of the true costs of a free-access regime. Part II details the benefits of free electronic access to federal court records.
Part III argues that, in the tradition of Richmond Newspapers, free access to electronic court records is a constitutionally necessary element of the structure of our modern Judiciary."
"Five years ago, in a post called “Making Excuses for Fees on Electronic Public Records,” I described my attempts to persuade the federal Judiciary to stop charging for access to their web-based system, PACER (“Public Access to Court Electronic Records”). Nearly every search, page view, and PDF download from the system incurs a fee ranging from 10 cents to $3 (or, in some cases, much more). I chronicled the many excuses that the courts have provided for charging what amounts to $150 million in fees every year for something that should—by all reasonable accounts—not cost much to provide."
Related Paper:
"The Price of Ignorance: The Constitutional Cost of Fees for Access to Electronic Public Court Records"
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3026779
Excerpt:
"This paper examines the public’s interest in free electronic access to federal court records and considers the relative strength of legal and policy arguments to the contrary. Part I performs an accounting of the true costs of a free-access regime. Part II details the benefits of free electronic access to federal court records.
Part III argues that, in the tradition of Richmond Newspapers, free access to electronic court records is a constitutionally necessary element of the structure of our modern Judiciary."