It's a travesty that we have to pay for this information at all!
Notably, the information is free up to a certain threshold.
Hm? FOIA requests are usually made to request the release of data which is not yet available to the public. Most such requests require some level of human intervention, e.g. to determine what sorts of records need to be searched, to perform manual searches on non-digitized or poorly indexed data, and to perform any necessary redaction on the retrieved data.
PACER, by contrast, is already fully automated. The court records it searches are all already digitized, and have all been cleared for release; literally the only thing which users are paying for is the operation of the service.
I'd say in this way they're relatively analogous, though you're partially correct in pointing out some of the differences.
The sad reality is that if someone was accused of something and later recused, many casual observers will fail to double click through everything to uncover that the defendant was cleared of any wrong doing. Even worse, many people settle whilst innocent as the cost of litigation exceeds settlement requests—-therefore even if someone did double click to learn the outcome, their reputation is tarnished nonetheless.
I hate paying the pacer fees, but if it creates a barrier to people misusing (which I am 100% certain will happen) what they find, then the Pacer fees are in fact a good thing. Put bluntly, unlocking Pacer to be free for all will have a devastating effect on minorities who have been racially targeted by bad actors in the past.
Opinions and orders are available for free from government sources. Also, important motions and other filings are usually made available too.
It costs money to run PACER, so fees are required, like for many government services. The issue here is that the collected fees were higher than needed, providing a slush fund that did not require congressional appropriation.
Similarly, the USPTO is self-funded by user fees that are over priced. The excess fees provide a slush fund for congress.
Where are opinions and order available?
I signed up just to see if I could pull dockets on publically traded companies, so I'd know if there'd be litigation before others and get an edge in trading.
It was about 2 hours of using the system before I realized this would be impossible (you know, on my personal budget.) I think I made like under 10 searches and racked up over a dollar in fees. Some of the pages actually charge you per search result not even search. So if you query a term and you get 100 results, that's 100 charges.
I feel like using PACER data to inform stock trading signals is a pretty niche use case... For "regular people" that have a connection with a few cases, I think it should be free, and it was in my experience.