Bill to tear down federal courts’ paywall gains momentum in Congress | Hacker News Reader

Bill to tear down federal courts’ paywall gains momentum in Congress

arstechnica.com

187 pointsrbanffy31 comments

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I've been trying to look at the court filings over the lawsuit to extend Census data collection.

I got 3/4 of the way through registering for PACER before I gave up.

Apparently it's 10 cents per page, and if you incur less than $3 of charges in a quarter, you won't be billed.

But you still have to provide your credit card to get access.

PACER's UX is pretty bad.

Convincing organisations that their UX is pretty bad is...hard.

> Convincing organisations that their UX is pretty bad is...hard.

I think it depends on whom at the organisation you try to convince. I think that it's probably true that a lot of organisations are perfectly aware that their UX is pretty bad, but they (as a collective) have spent so much time learning to deal with the ways that it's bad that they don't see it as that bad.

So I think that the real problem is convincing an organisation that their UX is bad enough to justify ripping it out and replacing it with a new UX, that will (statistically speaking) also be bad, but now different and unfamiliar.

The additional problem is that organizations with bad UX frequently have a UX designed around the structure of the organization.

When this happens, the UX is convenient for each part of the organization, and if they rebuild it they will naturally be tempted to rebuild it the same way. Everyone may know that the whole is less than the sum of its parts, but doing anything else requires fighting uphill against politics.

Especially government organizations who have a monopoly on the access or functionality the interface provides.

UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) team has a different approach. In 2014 they undertook a redesign of all UK government sites with an emphasis on being usable for everyone. At the time it was controversial (see el reg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9067984) but it's been widely lauded since.

See also their design principles:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles

You can get most of the documents for popular cases from RECAP (mentioned in this story). RECAP has a browser extension that harvests documents when people pay for them with their own PACER accounts, and reposts them to their service [0]. A federal judge rejected the State of Washington's motion for a temporary restraining order (in a lawsuit regarding CHAZ). I was interested in the filings, so I used my PACER account to download them. Then I checked RECAP, and found they were there already.

I don't think PACER requires a credit card -- my account is set up to bill me if I incur more charges than the complimentary $30/quarter.

I used my PACER account to file in the Court of Appeals. It was very convenient, much easier than mailing a big envelope to their filing clerk. Attorneys are required to file in the federal courts electronically with text-searchable PDFs. Pro Se (without an attorney) filers have to ask the district court for permission to file electronically, but the Court of Appeals didn't have that bar to filing electronically.

tl/dr: if you're going to file Pro-Se in federal court (bankruptcy/civil/etc), get a PACER account and sign up for electronic notification of filings.

[0] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/ and https://free.law/

Perhaps I missed a zero, is the threshold for billing 30 or 3 dollars per quarter? (I guess viewing 30 filings vs 300?)

Also I definitely gave up at the point they asked for a CC (which I didn't have handy at the time). The UX certainly led me to believe this was a required step; are you saying I could skip that step?

If so, is the idea that you could theoretically rack up a lot of charges in one quarter before they cut you off for non-payment? Seems like an easy way to game the system...just sign up for a new account every quarter.

The billing threshold was formerly $15/quarter; now it's $30. I don't have a CC stored on my account, and have never hit the threshold for them to mail/email me a bill. I think they asked for a CC, but I saw the option for 'just bill me and I'll send a check'.

> Seems like an easy way to game the system...just sign up for a new account every quarter.

As I recall, they mailed me something via the USPS before my account was activated. I don't think it'd be very smart to intentionally rack up charges with the branch of government responsible for putting people in cages, and think you could just walk away from those charges.

I'm very curious if anyone has a reading and interpretation of this case yet. It's a sad state that we have to turn to singular sources for matters of law that should be public.

Here's the docket for that case on the recap archive btw. As is typical for high profile cases it looks to have basically every interesting document available (for free) except for transcripts.

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17454475/national-urban...

Thank you!

Aside from courtlistener.com, can anyone remind me, what is that site that acts like Scihub for legal briefs and opinions/decisions?

I will say that something really shoddy about newspaper journalism on most court-related topics is that they never give the reader the actual case reference to go read about. As if the reporter is the last authoritative interpreter about the subject, and there isn't a mountain of readily accessible info to read more about it.

Honestly, PACER is the least offensive docketing system I’ve used in the US, especially given that the charge for each document is capped $3. State court systems are worse.

Delaware charges around $40 to search for a case, and then charges $10 for each document you pull. And don’t get me started on how terrible California is since each county has their own docketing system, and many still only have paper filing. It’s a joke that you still have to send a runner to a court in Silicon Valley to file or pull a document.

Organisations generally strive to have multiple sources of revenue so that they can continue to pay salaries despite interruptions in one source.

This also applies to the Federal Courts, which do not have any one source of funding they see as stable[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_United_State...

This was used against them in a previous ruling (CA?). The ruling stated the funds need to only be used to maintain the access system, not anything else.

Oddly the last person who "gets" the imperative of getting access to the law for free is a lawyer.

I do not know how to research this, but what is the status on EU? How EU does this? I know that in Sweden it is only one email and you can get any public document. Even the emails of publicly funded positions.

All EU legislation (Treaties, Directives, Regulations etc.) and case law (decisions of the Court of Justice, and the GC & CST) are up on a website called EUR-LEX, usually in both HTML and PDF, and in every official language of the EU (at the time that the legislation or decision was made—earlier documents aren't retroactively translated into languages of countries that have joined subsequently).

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/

Example of a CJEU decision: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:61...

Example of legislative text (a Directive): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...

If you are comparing it with PACER, there are some differences - PACER contains loads more documents than you get on EUR-LEX including lots of procedural stuff, filings, and so on, while EUR-LEX only tends to have the court opinion, the Advocate-General opinion, and maybe a bit of procedural stuff, but not much else.

This is because the CJEU is in practice a court that only deals with matters of law that have been referred from a national court (or from another EU institution, like the Commission). Comparing the CJEU and a US federal district court is comparing apples with oranges.

If you compare to the US Supreme Court, note that all of the filings at that level are available for free. See, e.g., https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/....

The EU just released the Justice scoreboard 2020 detailing the differences between all EU countries.

Check out figures 27-29 for info on online access and other forms of digitization: https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/justice_scoreboar...

Court decisions are anonymized when published online in the EU. Is this the same in the US?

Hopefully we can tear down the paywall or federally enforceable laws next. It is a travesty that laws can be passed for compliance with proprietary standards which are not accessible to the public.

We should not forget that this paywall exists only because Congress forced it to exist.

From the article is sounds like several commercial services (like background checks) are using this data in very high volume. The charges may simply have been put in place to offset the cost of serving these high volume customers.

Should the US government subsidize the commercial interests by providing unlimited access for free? Or, is it their duty to provide the information for free to any citizen or US company as a function of the government?

Sibling comments already mentioned that it's free individuals if your volume is low enough. They charge 10 cents per page and if your quarterly charges don't exceed $30, you don't get billed. That works out to around 300 "free" pages per quarter per person.

On the flip side, the courts are blatantly ignoring the law and charging orders of magnitude more than congress authorized them to.

No one comes out smelling rosy in this right now.

I’m on the fence over this issue. Yes, it’s egregious for citizens to have to pay a lot of money to access court records. At the same time, the system provides an independent source of funding for the judiciary. If Congress succeeds in tearing down this paywall then courthouses will become more reliant on Congress to fund them in the budget.

It’s not hard to see how some future Congress might hold the judiciary hostage by cutting funding.

The nominal cost of providing a page on the internet is nowhere close to 10 cents. It's a stupid way to make money. If the judiciary needs money, they need to figure out something more sensible than begging for 10 cents a page.

No, it's closer to the opposite. The statute says that the courts "may, only to the extent necessary" charge fees for access to PACER. I don't think there would be any legal barrier to the courts eliminating the paywall other than the courts have become dependent on the revenue stream. I suppose in that sense Congress has forced it to exist by failing to provide an alternative funding source.

> "may only to the extent necessary"

You would think 10¢ per page would be excessive though. Thankfully, that ruling a few weeks ago agreed. I could understand that cost if you had to go to an actual courthouse and have a clerk photocopy it for you, but the cost of transferring a PDF of these sizes over the internet is less than 10¢ per document.

This is probably a good development overall but I'd be concerned that the data ends up in Equifax or Transunion. For years they reported erroneously that I had numerous tax liens against me, the only reason it ever got resolved is that laws were changed so that they had to verify the SSN and DOB and since the courts did not provide that information they had to drop them. Who knows what will end up in my report if they are free to scrape all of the judgements and do the same lackluster job of matching them to people.

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