And arron swartz is dead. Not sure how many of the docs made public are ones that we was trying to hack in to. That incident will always leave a bitter taste in my mouth.
What do you think would happen if somebody with a research agreement downloaded everything and released it all to the public? You'd probably then find that the two situations are very similar.
Now, what would happen if you breached the research agreement? You’d probably be sued for breach of contract. But that’s not what case.law is doing. It’s abiding by everyone’s legal rights: the original publishers who collected, archived, indexed, and added annotations to the case law, and the folks who helped digitize versions that could be freely distributed. The government paid for the courts so the cases are free, but it didn’t pay for all those other things and they aren’t free.
> If someone did a very similar thing here to what Swartz did with JSTOR, this situation would then be very similar to what Swartz did with JSTOR.
Analogously, one could ask what would happen if someone avoided their taxes vs. evaded their taxes. Both could be seen as morally the same act, but the legal consequences are different.
[1] PACER is literally a read-only view into the same databases courts and lawyers use to file documents and orders in cases. Some people want a mass-publishing system for court documents, and maybe we should build such a thing. But calls to abuse PACER for that purpose are just an end-run around the political challenges of getting the government to spend public money building such a system.
If I understand you correctly there is such a thing. https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/ is a public archive populated by browser plugins by paid PACER users.
The issue is that PACER is designed primarily for attorneys. That's why the usage fees are so high--it's a basically a tax on attorneys that goes to funding the operations of the courts. (Pro se individuals are entitled to receive filings in their cases for free.)
The open access folks have a legitimate point that PACER makes it hard for the public to access those same documents. But the solution to that isn't to abuse PACER. If we think everyone should have free access to these documents,[1] the solution is to build a website where these things are published. And, since that would undercut the value of PACER, arrangements would have to be made to replace that revenue with general appropriations.
[1] Note the reason we would want to do this is that these are public records, not because they constitute "the law." Court opinions with precedential value are already published on courts' websites in PDF format. What PACER contains is everything else.
Makes me wonder how much overreach goes on and we don't even know about it...
Ortiz and Heymann are definitely horrible people in my eyes but we have to think of them as responding to incentives. They saw they had an opportunity to pad their numbers and went for it. I don't think we have done anything to fix the core issue, which I think is how do we judge the performance of a prosecutor?