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Comment by blintz | Hacker News Reader

Recap (https://free.law/recap/) is a really cool piece of civic tech to work around PACER’s absurd fees. Fantastic news that we could someday be rid of them.

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I'm the director of Free Law Project, the org that makes RECAP. We're always looking for help with the extension, our APIs, etc. We have a new project, for example, we're working on called the "PACER Pray and Pay Project". It'll let you pray for a document and have somebody else buy it for you. Lots of stuff in the works. If folks are looking to help an open source org, we'd love to hear from you.

Best way to get in touch?

Edit: Also, have you considered going through YC’s non profit pipeline, if only for access to their network and partner resources?

https://www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/

Good point! https://free.law/contact/

I'll be in touch. You're doing great work, work I hope I can make a meaningful contribution to!

Unfortunately we could never be free of PACER just through RECAP because of new documents.

Anyone can help though without incurring a financial penalty. Install recap extension, make a PACER account, and request new documents. Extension automatically uploads what you request and it'll show up on courtlistener free for all.

Keep it under $30/quarter and PACER waives the fees.

Is there a way to automate this to get Recap and PACER to converge on coverage?

It wouldn’t be hard technically but who will pay for it?

Nobody, if you keep it under $30 per quarter per contributing user

It almost strikes me as sort of like a torrent or something like Folding@Home. If everyone signed up to the service and provided their credentials (lets ignore the obvious security issues here), when someone requested a document via RECAP it could use the accounts that have signed up. It would use each account until it got near the $30 threshold and then move on to the next one.

PACER would not cooperate with this. Also, the problem with automating it is that accounts require a credit card, so you'd have to give the automation script the ability to charge your credit card (if there's a bug for example).

I don't think the idea is full headless automation but rather some way of coordinating which set of new documents should be retrieved by each volunteer (until either their free limit or willingness to donate time runs out). Maximizing efficiency in this way would presumably increase overall coverage.

It would be interesting to let people sign up and hand over credentials for recap to automate downloading of other people's requests, with the understanding that you could cancel at any time and that if the automated downloading went over budget such that you were charged, you would be reimbursed.

Isn't RECAP piracy in some way? Granted, I don't know if these documents are protected by any copyright law, or if they're provided to users under some limited license, that would let the government sue.

No, the documents are explicitly not copyrightable.

Anyone else could setup a pacer alternative and just pay for the docs once. I think some legal services even do that.

Not true:

https://www.trademarkandcopyrightlawblog.com/2014/07/westlaw...

Okay then, copyright on them is just unenforceable.

Documents created by judges and other federal court employees are automatically in the public domain as works of the federal government.

PACER also includes documents filed by the parties to cases, which don't have the same cut-and-dried nature. A fair use argument probably goes a long way here but that's always more uncertain.

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