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Comment by site-packages1 | Hacker News Reader

I agree that they're public records, but you even have to pay reasonable fees for FOIA requests, which are also public records. There is some cost in maintaining and distributing the records. While it's true that the government could pay for it as a public service, and I believe they should, PACER is self-funded via these fees for now. In that regard, it's actually quite a good system, unreliant on annual budgets by Congress, but instead funded via the users at a pro rata rate for how much use a user gets out of it.

Notably, the information is free up to a certain threshold.

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> You even have to pay reasonable fees for FOIA requests, which are also public records…

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.

There are plenty of FOIA requests where the responder simply has to do a quick search of digital internal records that already exist but aren't "public" in the same way that PACER records aren't "public" because they're behind a paywall. Further, it's no longer the case that "most" such requests require human intervention such as "perform[img] manual searches on non-digitized or poorly indexed data," though it is true someone needs to check for redactions. Think of the average case being like the high touch PACER option: someone takes your FOIA request, performs an internal digital search, checks to make sure results look good, and emails them to you.

I'd say in this way they're relatively analogous, though you're partially correct in pointing out some of the differences.

Taxes should cover this sans abusers.

Yeah, that's basically what I said. My comment was more that outside of a normative sense, it's actually a good system.

If a judgment is not in the public domain and freely accessible, it should not carry the weight of law.

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