“Free PACER” bill advances through Senate judiciary unanimously | Hacker News Reader

“Free PACER” bill advances through Senate judiciary unanimously

fixthecourt.com

456 pointswalterbell148 comments

PACER should have been free from the beginning. Gatekeeping legal information for profit (even if only used to supplement appropriations) isn't only a problem at the federal level. In many states you need a commercial subscription to even read court opinions and statutes, let alone search. Localities in most places rely on commercial publishers to archive the text of ordinances, which only those with ridiculously expensive subscriptions can access. The digitization of everything had just begun when I retired, but the handwriting was already on the wall. The contrast with the widespread availability of technical doc is staggering: and reminds me of why I changed careers.

The central dictum of the legal profession: "you will have to pry every piece of the leverage I have over you out of my cold, dead hands."

> "central dictum"

This is an interesting choice of terms, since in the legal world "dictum" typically refers to a statement included in a legal opinion that is not central to the court's holding (decision). The full name is "obiter dictum", meaning "something said in passing", but it's almost always just called "dictum" or "dicta" (plural).

So although the ordinary definition of "dictum" is akin to pronouncement/dictate, in the legal context, "dictum" is a term of derogation ("that's just dictum"). To a lawyer, "central dictum" would be a contradiction in terms. Of course, this isn't a legal forum, so there's nothing wrong with what you said. It just causes mental hiccups for those of us afflicted with a legal background!

A similar injustice is that many building codes are privately copyrighted AND enforced by law.

They are privately copyrighted because those organizations research and develop the codes which is a significant expense.

Since it's unlikely that taxpayers will accept paying for all of this stuff, the likely outcome is that specific code references will be removed from the law and replaced with an insurance requirement. And insurers are going to require the ferris wheel or elevator or boiler to comply with the same code that used to be in the law.

I honestly feel like America is on a different planet sometimes. If it's required by law, then it should be free to read. What do you mean organizations research and develop codes at an expense? What organisations? Anyone other than the government is in charge of setting up the law? That doesn't ring any alarm bells there?

Organizations such as everyone that works on standards at ISO, IEEE, etc. Should they be free to read? Yes! How am I supposed to comply with a law I can read, but can't follow? But the government doesn't need to do everything. In fact, quite a few laws defer to "best industry practices".

Of course, but these organisations, even if private entities, will be paid by the government to conduct research and offer best practices and advice, so if the taxpayer is already paying for it....then it should be free to read - OP made it sound as if private organisations conducted research out of their own good will and therefore it was justified to charge the public for it.....which is fine, but not if the rules become law!

Today the government usually doesn't pay them. They fund themselves by selling paper and electronic copies of the code. The idea is that if you are designing some type of equipment, then you should help pay for the development of the code governing that equipment.

It maybe makes sense for esoteric things but not at all for common things (like the building and electrical codes covering all houses.

Edit: Sometimes private organizations did write the codes for their members and later the government notices that's what everybody is using and it's working, so make it the law of the land.

It's frustrating that the government doesn't step in to pay/fund on behalf of the public in situations like that. Standards organizations should want such a guaranteed income stream.

Right? This idea literally goes back to the Code of Hammurabi.

> If it's required by law, then it should be free to read.

Nobody really disagrees with that. Most of the codes are available in paper form in libraries.

Organizations like the ASME (https://www.asme.org/) write the codes and they do a pretty good job.

And in the year 2021, it is reasonable to expect similar access via the web.

>I honestly feel like America is on a different planet sometimes.

"America" is a loosely-coupled minimum-viable veneer over private capital. As built, extraction and concentration of value is the primary purpose of the system. The roots of this settler-colony are still visible.

Forcing people to buy privately owned IP to comply with the law is effectively a tax. Taxpayers are still paying - it's just political money laundering.

It's a user fee, which is reasonable way to tax non-basic-needs.

There should be no user-fee on being able to know the law. That's the point, not that non-governmental organizations shouldn't be compensated if their work is used, required, or referenced by a law.

I think legislatures and code bodies will workaround this by removing references to particular codes and adding requirement to carry insurance. And before an insurer will cover a dangerous piece of equipment, they are going to insist on an engineering inspection and report declaring the equipment is safe to operate and inspectors and engineers mostly rely on the published codes.

It's also things like HIPAA where you have to conform to certain electronic formatting standards that are non-public documents, where it's not strictly about safety, but creating an actual standard.

It's similar for electrical and structural codes: when I'm occupying a building (not just living or owning, but working or shopping too), I can trust that it meets certain standards as set by law. These things are codified by law to be minimum standards, not about making people liable to produce their own, as the past has been shown many times, there will always be people who will knowingly put money over the lives of people (e.g. via fake or otherwise unscrupulous insurance companies in this case). Now, I don't mean that insurance shouldn't or can't be a part of the "system", just that the "standard" shouldn't be whatever someone will insure.

Also, I'm not even advocating that copyright should be assigned to the government, just that access to the basic standards be free in perpetuity. This would prevent people from selling works composed primarily of the standard, but allow the basic standard to be freely accessible. I believe this would also cover annotated guides unless the annotations make up more of the work than the original standard does? The original organization still has the sole ability to sell authoritative supplementary and annotated materials. As long as the basic standard could reasonably be followed without said materials:

* a bad situation would be the standard saying to use the "appropriate wire gauge for the situation" but only give the appropriate guage in supplimentry material, and a

* good example would be the standard stating that "in a plenum, wire meeting «such and such» rating must be used", and as long as "«such and such» rating" is something that could reasonably be found on the wire itself then fine, even if the supplimentry materials make it easier to identify such cabling or find the most appropriate/cost effective type for a given situation, as long as any cable with the rating would be safe.

Professionals, especially if egged on by their insurance companies, would most likely purchase the authoritative materials. On the other hand general consumers doing work for themselves, could reference library copies or cheaper, non-authoritative references. Much as it is now for many things like major electrical and structural changes, inspections need to done by certified individuals, who require insurance, and who are probably only insurable if they have their own access to the standards and supplementary materials.

A similar situations that exist current is the "Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways". It is published by the as a free pdf by the Federal Highway Administration, but only a few partnered corporation are allowed to sell print copies. I cannot find a definitive answer as to why, but in the early 1970s the FHWA became the owner and began publishing it, but before that it was a joint consortium of private entites most of who are still involved in its development.

While discussing transportation, AASHTO's "A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets" (a.k.a. the "Green Book") contains guidance and standards. There are some documents published by the FHWA that come close to my good example above, but some fall into my bad example, where it says to consider this, but then gives not minimum design standards. So, in general that is a mixed bag, and could beuch better. However, I still think that both are illustrative that a system where the basics are available, but other commentary is paid.

There are other, transitionary, options for current standards even if, for instance, all new ones must be freely available. For instance, it could be mandated that any standard that is currently proprietary, but required, must be held in some form at the county or local level in a manner accessible to the general public. The Green Book referenced earlier, could have to have a reference copy be available at a library in the county or a county office building open to the public. Similar to the electrical code, the general public doesn't need to have this constantly available to justify the money and storage space, but may have specific questions they want to look up, or verify for themselves.

Citizens have a right to know what the law is. That doesn't mean that the government can't work with technical organizations to ensure that while basic access is free, said organizations can still profit from the work they put in to create said standard.

Being able to access to the law itself is a basic need.

Needs don't get much more basic than "shelter" and in order to build a home in most of the US that means consulting electrical, plumbing, and gas codes, among others. Most jurisdictions just pass legislation to adopt a particular edition of a code book developed by a national association.

It gets worse. The codes are regularly changed in ways I've heard numerous experienced journeymen describe as being baffling, and it's fairly obvious that the changes happen to force everyone to buy a copy of the new edition.

Lot of the trades are just rotten to the core. For example, master electricians are almost completely exempt from continuing education/examination requirements that non-master-level electricians have to endure. New code comes out, all the regulars have to pass an exam about it. But the ME? He gets to flip open his wallet and sneer, "Master-electrician-license-immunnnniiittyyyyyy!"

Your average 25 year old electrician is probably far more up to speed on current standards than the 50 year old ME people are more likely to give work to because of "experience."

The supreme court recently upheld that people are legally allowed to know the laws that govern them without paying.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-1150_7m58.pdf

Only on hackernews would you read a comment saying that its fine for some corporation to hold the copyright on the law of the land.

I didn't say it's fine and in another comment I added that nobody disagrees that codes referenced by laws should be freely available, but the organizations making those codes do need to be compensated.

How happy would you be if you were an engineer who developed a set of equations around some dangerous piece of equipment and your consulting business was built around selling your expertise. Then the state government comes along and says "nice work, now it's the law".

I don't know how you get around the insurance backdoor that I mentioned. Any ideas?

Edit: Looking at the link you posted, that seems to be specifically about annotations to the law. How does it cover codes incorporated by reference? It might be right there and I'm not seeing it. I'm not used to reading these types of materials.

> How happy would you be if you were an engineer who developed a set of equations ... Then the state government comes along and says "nice work, now it's the law".

Personally, I'd be ecstatic if my work could have such a wide reaching impact as that

I get that, but surely you understand how others might be upset at effectively losing the copyright on their work.

You can’t copyright equations to begin with so this wouldn’t be an issue.

The organizations don’t write model code because they want to own the copyright they write model code so they, an unelected entity, can exercise an inordinate amount of power over legislation and draft regulations that further the business interests and line the pockets of their members.

Even without copyright protection the special interest groups will continue writing model code exactly as they were except that member corps might have to kick in a bit more money now that ordinary citizens won’t be subsidizing their efforts to manipulate the democratic process.

Simple, then don't have that work be part of enforceable code.

Thank you for that. I hadn't seen that case before. I sued the State here in Illinois a couple of years ago because I tried to FOIA some statutes and was rejected under the copyright exemption. The State even had their database admin come to testify that they paid thousands of dollars a month to LexisNexis. I cited all the previous district court and appellate rulings (from other circuits), but ultimately lost.

I thought you couldn't sue a state in its own courts. How did you manage to do it?

It’s the other way around - you can’t sue a state in another state’s court:

https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/franchise-tax-bo...

> It’s the other way around - you can’t sue a state in another state’s court

Sovereign immunity means you can’t sue a state in its own courts, either, except in the ways it has agreed to be suable, which tend to be a small subset of those reasons for which any other party would be.

I think you're referring to sovereign immunity.

That doesn't apply to FOIA cases as the law gives a statutory right to sue.

That was a very fact specific case that ruled that the GA legislature's copyright on the GA code was invalid. It's a stretch to expand that to something like the National Electrical Code or International Building Code since those copyrights are not owned by a legislature.

I'll have to read the opinion, but regulations are just as much part of the law as statues. If taxpayers have to foot the bill, so be it.

> regulations are just as much part of the law as statues.

The ruling does apply to regulations, it doesn't apply to material referenced in regulations (either directly or indirectly), which a whole lot of copyrighted things are.

(For an example of indirect reference, the HIPAA transactions and code sets rule regulations adopt CMS’s Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System as a standard code set for certain purposes. Great, as it's a federal government product, and therefore free from copyright burdens.

Except that the “Level 1 codes” in the HCPCS are defined by reference as the AMA’s Current Procedure Terminology codes, and the definition of that code set is under copyright and not freely available.

It's actually quite surprising to read such comment here.

I don't care. The law should be free, period. Cheaper to pay once through the legislature than to put a paywall on it.

Cheaper for some, more expensive for others.

Even though you aren't likely to build a petroleum distillation column in your apartment, you don't mind helping to pay for the ongoing R&D involved in producing the engineering codes governing that equipment? For esoteric stuff like that, I kind of like the user-fee model. If we all pay, it feels like another subsidy to (in this case) oil and gas companies.

There are wide swathes of laws and benefits in our society that will never touch me personally - that doesn't invalidate them. Just because I don't need a wheelchair I don't begrudge the push for ramp accessibility - ditto for things like childcare which my parents benefited from but which I've got no intention of exercising. These benefits build a better and more equitable world and I'm fine with paying an almost inconceivably small personal expense to maintain them.

Not everything in life needs to revolve around an absolute maximization of personal gain.

> Not everything in life needs to revolve around an absolute maximization of personal gain.

I'm stealing this if you don't mind. A very succinct way of putting a concept I've failed to explain before.

I don't need the column but I need what it produces. Thus I do pay the increased costs of putting it behind a paywall.

The taxpayers are already paying for this.

Are you thinking of one code in particular? I'm sure there are some that came out of academia and those likely are freely available.

You're being downvoted because people just want everything to be free without ever paying for it or doing any work to achieve it. They're the same people who expect politicians to fix everything for them, rather than us having to personally get involved in solving societal problems.

The same can be said about research colleges being backstopped by the taxpayer and having their research being paywalled by JSTOR. Are you willing to make the argument that all of this stuff should be paywalled?

As of 2013, the results of federally-funded research are supposed to be freely available. See the links to various policies here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27805716

You are correct that the public does not want to pay for them, this does not mean the government should be allowed to adopt them as well

The government should not adopt anything as law that is not publically accessible, the law absolutely has to open access to all persons if you are expected to follow it.

If the public does not want to fund the creation of building codes, then the building codes need to be done away with, or simplified to the point where the public will be willing to fund there

The building codes, like most standards, are filled with all kinds of things that have nothing to do with safety which the the sole area the government should be concerned with.

Government should have a safety code, then let the market compete for builders that want to voluntarily adopt the other standards

So there should be no minimum requirements for insulation for example since that's not really a safety issue or for pipe diameters etc.? There are a ton of things in building codes that are modern industry best practices that have nothing or very little to do with safety.

While building codes sometimes get implemented overly slavishly with old retrofits, in general requiring contractors/builders to meet minimum industry best practices is a good thing given that otherwise it's even more caveat emptor than it already is.

And, of course, any subsequent buyer has very little idea what standards the house was built to. (Which they may not anyway with older houses but at least codes are a start.)

This is a difference in worldview as to what the proper role of government should be.

For insulation, no I do not believe there should be a government enforced standard, and analog to the IT world, we have all kinds of "standards" almost none of them enforced by law. Companies advertise they are complaint with standard X, or Y because it advantageous for them to do so

Builders of home could to the same, insurers of home could require it in order to insure a home, or provide discounts if a home is compliant with X standard, mortgage companies could require it, or factor it in to the appraisals.

There are all kinds of market based, none government methods to apply standards

Government action, which you must remember is back by the threat of violence, should be reserved for things that directly impact safety

>>any subsequent buyer has very little idea what standards the house was built to.

Here I do see a role for government, in disclosure laws, and enforcement of fraud if a seller claim a home was built to X standard and it was not

If you start dabbling in DIY remodeling you'll soon find yourself trying understand parts of the national electrical and plumbing codes. They actually remind me a lot of reading the C++XX standards--clearly the product of a ton of time and effort by a bunch really smart and experienced people. There's no way in hell an elected body could/should ever wrote those. So, while I'm not saying that the current system is ideal or even fair, there's absolutely a need to compensate somebody to write and maintain these standards.

Which is irrelevant to whether citizens should have to pay for the texts. If you want private parties to write them, write their contract so the government is paying for full rights to the text, and then distribute them for free.

There is an entire missing and/or inadequate subset of the law that the country as a whole and regional governments need to adopt, regulating how governments are allowed to enter into contracts. I'm sure people here could name a dozen other categories but a few that come to mind that should very possibly be banned:

- Entering into NDAs -- should governments be allowed to keep secrets for a business they enter into a contract with or do the people have the right to know everything a gov learns in the course of doing business?

- Proprietary products, software & services -- if an off-the-shelf alternative exists should govs be permitted to pay for something that they might have to trash as soon as as a contract ends? or something that might go up in price any possible % if they wish to renew?

- Sweeping prosecution agreements -- should govs be able to contract with police unions on matters like deferring interrogations when the suspect or indicted person is police? or similarly for government officials?

- Privatizing -- should govs be allowed to sell basically anything? that is, if the public has funded the ownership & maintenance of something with tax dollars should a government be able to transfer it to some business or individual rather than lease? without a vote / auction?

The NEC is available to read online for that reason, although if your not an electrician, it's nearly incomprehensible. I have an entire book explaining bonding and grounding. It requires too much experience to understand, but it is still essential to a free society that laws be public.

It's getting even worse than that. In some cities and counties, you have to pay to read real estate records online. Public documents that were free just a few years ago are now behind paywalls. Even though my tax dollars paid for these systems that were supposed to make the public documents public.

Want to read it for free? Come on down to the courthouse, fill out a paper form, and we'll find the right book for you. Also for a fee.

See also: GIS systems.

Yup. And then charge you a dollar a page to make copies.

Technical docs are better but far from perfect. For example, could you please link me to a copy of the C++ standard? It's ISO/IEC 14882:2020, if that helps.

The drafts are available in openstd, both of older versions of the standard[0], and the next, upcoming version[1].

Those are not technically the actual standards, but they're pretty close. But yes, I too dislike the fact that ISO standards are paid for. You know what bugs me the most? ISO 9660, the standard behind the .iso file format. It's been published in 1988, and today still costs roughly 130EUR to buy...

[0]: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/standards

[1]: https://github.com/cplusplus/draft

Going for the drafts is a clever workaround I hadn't thought of, thanks!

I think things are slowly moving in the right direction though, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_v._Public.Resource.Org....

Hats off to the Free Law Project for championing this. Success is possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158

Aaron Swartz should be credited for his early activism in support of making this public good accessible.[1]

I suspect that it played a role in how vicious the prosecutor Carmen Ortiz was in United States v. Aaron Swartz, the later case about bulk downloading of research on JSTOR from the MIT library system, and which eventually lead to his suicide.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#PACER

Was curious what that prosecutor had gotten up to. https://theintercept.com/2021/02/15/marty-walsh-aaron-swartz...

Live by the sword…

Her fatal mistake was not knowing that rubbing shoulders with people who operate on the national stage and having ambitions to be one of them herself meant she had to care about optics at that level. And driving a college kid to suicide over what's basically alleged petty theft is rather tactless in that context. Driving a college kid to suicide over allegations of what basically amounts giving "the system" the bird with a side of petty theft would have gone over just fine at the state level.

Aaron was not a "college kid." He killed himself about seven years after he dropped out of Stanford, at 26 years old.

She spent a considerable amount of time negotiating a plea deal that Swartz ultimately rejected against the advice of every friend he asked for advice, and his attorney - probably one of the most prominent, knowledgeable, respected attorneys one could have working for them on such a case.

It was a slam-dunk case for her on a number of points, starting with the fact that the feds had let him walk away from the PACER stunt with nothing more than "don't do something like this again" but also a preponderance of physical and digital evidence of him going out of his way to avoid efforts to stop him and to increase the rate of his downloads despite knowing how much he was impacting the service.

Despite that solid case, the prosecutor did what prosecutors do for rich, privileged, white men: she gave him a softball plea - a few months jail time. Fairly reasonable punishment for the expense he caused JSTOR, and the number of academic careers and researchers he disrupted through his purposefully seeking to pull down as much JSTOR content, as fast as possible. I don't think the tech community understands how much of an impact the JSTOR outages Swartz caused; they were too busy circlejerking over his efforts for a "free and open" internet.

His attorney saw the told him it was a great deal. But Aaron was too proud to spend a single day in jail and said as much. He declined the plea deal. Again, against the entirety of advice he'd been given.

You know what a federal prosecutor does when they have a really solid case but despite that spend ages negotiating over a plea deal anyway, only to have it tossed back in their face?

They do their jobs.

People act like she was the big bad wolf for going after him for so many crimes that would have resulted in decades of jail time. But the thing is - even if he was convicted, he likely would have received a very light sentence in minimum security. But instead, he killed himself. Not because of the mountain of crimes he'd been charged with, but because he was so dead set on not spending a day behind bars.

Aaron was happy to do the crime, happy to impact others...but couldn't do the time. And probably thought that because of his wealth and fame (and probably his own idea of his intelligence) he wouldn't possibly lose and actually go to jail.

Go read what his girlfriend wrote about him. She thought he was an idiot, and says as much. She's right. He was a brilliant computer programmer but a principled, immature, egotistical idiot.

Oh, and lastly: Swartz had expressed suicidal thoughts and ideation for years. Maybe if you have mental health problems that serious, don't purposefully go cruising for trouble and pick fights with the federal government?

The movement to make PACER free began long before Swartz, and his death almost a decade ago was not the catalyst for making it free now.

This is great news. I had to implement PACER integration back in my days at Gusto for compliance and the pricing among many other things was very annoying to work with. The pricing is based on "number of pages" returned, which means that when you submit a query you don't know exactly how it will cost you ahead of time.

That’s the best part of PACER!

The other exciting thing is the threatening letter you get from the government when they can’t charge your expired credit card for $9 and threaten to withhold that amount from your tax return if you don’t pay the balance.

The best part was for us was that after wrangling with their native API, we decided to go with one of the private companies that provide sane API wrapper on top of PACER. It's kinda crazy that there is a small industry of companies who make government api better. You can see some of these services by googling "bankruptcy monitoring".

Same for public sector procurement (Request for Qualification/Proposal) portals. All the portals are annoying because there are 50 of them, and each of the portal have their way of navigation and filters. So, it become PITA to remember every portal tendency. There is a private website that offer a meta indexer service (with filters) that scrapped every single bit of procurement portal contents as for a fee monthly. I forgot the name of the site in the top of my head. It is worth the paid service for procurement.

This sounds awesome! Now here's hoping they might do the same for the tax system someday. If only Intuit could stop lobbying to keep it a horrible train wreck.

Call your representatives. Share your concerns. In volume, it moves the needle.

You're right. I haven't done that in awhile. Thank you for the reminder.

Has the tax system ever become less of a trainwreck? I'm not an expert, but the trainwreckedness seems to monotonically increase. On multiple occasions in the past, significant numbers of voters have contacted their representatives to discuss just this topic. Why didn't voicing their concerns work on those occasions, and why will it be different this time around?

Yeah, Reagan drastically simplified the tax code in 1986 by eliminating a ton of deductions and expanding the standard deduction. [1]

(It also lowered the top tax rate from 50% to 28%, and raised the bottom tax rate from 11% to 15%, so it wasn't a complete win).

For all its faults, the Trump admin also nearly doubled [2] the standard deduction in 2017, which hugely simplifies taxes for the people who choose to use it.

From Wikipedia:

> The standard deduction nearly doubles, from $12,700 to $24,000 for married couples. For single filers, the standard deduction will increase from $6,350 to $12,000. About 70% of families choose the standard deduction rather than itemized deductions; this could rise to over 84% if doubled.

Much of the information that TurboTax asks for is just help you figure out whether or not to choose the standard deduction. (At least that's what Intuit claims, but if you don't opt-out of the data sharing agreement, they get to have an absolute field day with all the financial data you've given them).

But if you choose the standard deduction, the logic is usually quite simple, and you don't need massively complex software to help you.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tax-Reform-Act

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/taxes/trumps-tax-reform-plan-ex...

But if you choose the standard deduction, the logic is usually quite simple, and you don't need massively complex software to help you.

This is true. Since the turbotax web form seems to help many taxpayers (the other possibility is that it's all SEO?), it might be nice if IRS ran an analogous web form in addition to what they do now.

> (It also lowered the top tax rate from 50% to 28%, and raised the bottom tax rate from 11% to 15%, so it wasn't a complete win).

The Tax Reform Act of 1986 also eliminated a ton of shenanigans that sophisticated taxpayers could play with income and expenses. For example, prior to the reform you could write off any interest expense against your income. So, you could borrow money to invest in long-term investments and then deduct the interest expense against your current employment income. There were investment products that were essentially just buying a tax deduction. The reforms shut all of that down.

> Yeah, Reagan drastically simplified the tax code in 1986 by eliminating a ton of deductions and expanding the standard deduction. [1]

That was how Reagan advertised it. A professional I know called Reagan's tax law 'The Tax Attorneys and Accountants Relief Act of 1986' because it created so many complexities and so much work for them.

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts is obviously incompetent to carry out this work. Anyone who demands nine years to do this shouldn't be taken seriously.

All documents should simply be dumped into a common repository. S3 would do fine. Define some standards for common document metadata so each document is identified by case, author, type, etc. Enable S3 version histories.

Then create an API for creating cases and uploading documents. This will require some controls, logins, security, and some facility for billing users for filing fees. If the court just provides an API, they can stop there.

Private companies who want to provide a user interface to lawyers and the public can do so. I'm sure that more than a few will make searches and document downloads free.

And that's it. If the government would just get out of the way, this could be done in six months to a year and would be very, very cheap.

>And that's it. If the government would just get out of the way, this could be done in six months to a year and would be very, very cheap.

Absolute nonsense. People continiously underestimate the scale in which external facing government offerings are.

> This will require some controls, logins, security, and some facility for billing users for filing fees

Some? It's a very serious business with a lot of rules to implement.

> If the government would just get out of the way, this could be done in six months to a year and would be very, very cheap.

Based on what?

Based on my 40 years of experience as a software developer.

Look at it then as a developer in the real world: I doubt 40 years taught you to give estimates for systems you've never seen, for needs you know nothing about, for clients and users you know nothing about. My guess is that much more often, like everyone else in our industry, you deal with clueless people on the outside who say, 'why should that take so long? it's simple!'.

20 of my 40 years has involved managing and searching document repositories of various flavors. Prior to that, many of my clients were law firms. And yes, I have built more than one legal document repository.

>> systems you've never seen, for needs you know nothing about, for clients and users you know nothing about.

Perhaps you should make fewer assumptions about what I know.

If this had passed fifteen years ago, the FBI would never have launched their investigation into Aaron Swartz, the one preceding the MIT prosecution. Maybe he'd still be alive.

It's good to see when good tools, like RECAP, become obsolete because of wider improvements. Mission accomplished.

It's also good to see unanimous bipartisan action doing simple good things.

As one of the developers of RECAP, I am delighted to see the project become obsolete!

Please have Archive Team copy the RECAP site to archive.org before you shut down the project and site.

https://archiveteam.org/

Great work, guys!

As an aside, do you have any (broad) insights into who installs the browser extensions? I don't mean the individual people -- I mean is it media, law firms, students...?

Giving the article contenteditable=true is certainly...a choice, especially because that makes the links unclickable.

Probably done by the editor, and forgot to disable it when shipping to prod ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ha! a mockup mode they forgot to turn off, right? it doesn't seem to be on other pages.

Note that links are still right-clickable, took me a second to try that.

It looks fixed now.

For reference: [1] shows the currently-free RECAP ("PACER" spelled backwards) listing for the Elizabeth Holmes / Theranos trial.

The way this works is: you install a Chrome extension which automatically uploads anything you get from PACER into a free archive.

How are they funded? I expect they're a 501(c)(3). So it's not a question of whether PACER can be free; it already is, partially.

As for patents: Google used to host all the patent files for free, and then someone complained that that gave them an unfair advantage (note: but what???), so now someone else hosts them for free.

So I don't think finding the funding is really much of an issue nowadays.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7185174/united-states-v...

The unfair advantage, I suspect, may have been that Google could look to see which patents were popular, or which ones were popular at a particular company, or which ones were becoming popular at a particular university. They already have that unfair advantage when it comes to search traffic, but reading a patent can expose you to treble damages for willful infringement.

Yeah, no. I was in Google Patent Litigation. "Treble damages" is just something lawyers like to use to scare the engineers with.

Besides the "treble damages" urban legend (more on that below):

* G was putting the patents online as soon as the PTO made them available. There was no delay so G could mine them for those nuggets of valuable IP.

* There are no nuggets of valuable IP to be mined in patents.

* Even if there were, ideas are a dime a dozen. It's execution that matters.

* "Treble damages":

  * first of all, the plaintiff hires a "damages expert" to calculate a good number to ask for. These people make a lot of money. "Willfulness" as in "engineer reading a patent" does not even enter into it.

  * secondly, "willfulness" comes from the plaintiff writing a formal letter to the defendant informing them of the patent, and asking them to take a license. It's always from discussions with their lawyers, or maybe someone talking about it on email.

  * ask yourself: if it *were* from engineers *reading* a patent, how would they even know? From their own web logs? How would they know who at the defendant's company was reading it? Wouldn't that be obscured by the defendant's internet interface?

To anyone else who's reading this thread later on, you should be aware that my comprehensive, factual rebuttal, full of citations to caselaw, law-review articles, and statute, demonstrating the egregious falsehood of the parent comment, has been "flagged" and so is not visible by default; it's at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29505838, and you can see it by signing up for an HN account and turning on the "showdead" setting in your profile.

Please, please do not base your strategy for dealing with patents on the dangerous falsehoods "AlbertCory" is spreading here. It could destroy your company or your career. Don't be fooled by his claims to expertise. Don't take my word for it either. Read the law review article I recommended in my other comment, written by two of the top patent litigators in the world: https://btlj.org/data/articles2015/vol18/18_4/18-berkeley-te...

PACER is a wonderful tool, but the current website is Byzantine. I'm very happy that it's getting some much-needed attention.

how is PACER wonderful? charging exorbitant fees to access the laws that govern me is a complete racket.

Well, the fees aren't wonderful, but the information you can get out of it is excellent. I grew up in not-America, where access to court records is even more difficult and expensive (e.g. have to have a lawyer do it for you).

I didn't know that Free PACER was a thing, but I'm happy that it is!

It is, and its 100% funded by the fees they charge attorney's and others to access the documents. The amount of fees and use of them is somewhat ridiculous currently, but if they remove the fees without setting up an ongoing funding source I'm afraid it will stagnate like many state court systems.

I want to make one more comment and then I am done. Access to the federal court system is a bargain. An absolute bargain. You can usually file a case for about $350-400, and the fees are tempered or removed if you can prove indigency. You get a LOT for your money if your case is legitimate. You can potentially eat up hundreds of hours of court room (judge, clerk) time, which is clearly tens of thousands of dollars worth of work.

The court system is incredibly subsidized in the USA.

Shame about the lawyer fees....!

PACER explored new boundaries in regulatory capture “from the inside.” It is now all too obvious a trend to have taxpayers fund and mandate the development of an institution, then subsequently build a sinecure upon its rental to those same taxpayers. This kind of triple-dipping is grotesque, and never should have been allowed in the first place.

I have to say that anything to increase court transparency and access to the general public is great.

The Rittenhouse trial really highlighted how crooked some prosecutors are (filing bogus charges that the judge ended up throwing out, trying to introduce evidence rejected by the court and withholding key evidence from the defense and even going as far as to try to deny the defendant his constitutional rights). The only reason the public got to see all that was because of unfiltered, democratic access thanks to television.

Now, how many innocent black men had the prosecution pull the exact same tricks and were bullied into taking a plea deal? When only "approved media organizations" can afford access to the court, we might never know.

Somewhen during this year Santa Clara Superior Court removed case documents from their online case access, now only dates and parties are available there. So much for the progress, and that in Silicon Valley :) During physical access to the case documents at the court building one is prohibited from using say phone or any other camera.

A workaround that will be useful until this gets implemented:

https://free.law/recap https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/

On the one hand, this is a good thing for the easy ability to access public information.

On the other hand, this removes an important backup source of funding for the US federal courts.

On the gripping hand, it is bonkers that court admins are wise to prepare for the 2023 government shutdown.

It’s about time. You are charged fees to download files but once you do you could share them for free, post them anywhere and such since it’s public record. The search engine is also this horrendous contraption that charges you based on the number of search results returned.

The whole thing is a horror show and glad to see this on the path to being shut down for good. A public S3 bucket with logically named file prefixes and some simple search on top could literally replace this whole hot mess overnight.

Does this mean that all the documents (emails from tech executives) that are part of the evidence for a court case will be publicly available?

No, generally evidence is not filed as part of a docket. PACER only includes court filings such as the complaint, answer, motions, orders, etc.

And quotations from evidence produced during discovery are often redacted from those filings.

They are already publicly available. You can access up to, IIRC, $30 worth of PACER for free each month. I know my access usually comes under the free boundary.

But as poster below mentions, it depends on how the documents exist. There are two types of documents in a court case: common law record and discovery.

Discovery = evidence kept by both sides, but not held by the court. This includes written documents, audio/video recordings, but also the transcripts of any depositions that have been taken of important people in the law suit. (A deposition is where you sit down with a person and question them under oath outside of the court room)

Common law record = anything that is said in court, or filed in court.

Most discovery never makes it into a court room. It is just shuffled back and forth between the plaintiff and defendant.

Now, when it comes time to file a motion (let's say one of the parties tries to get the case dismissed) then it will usually be necessary to attach some documents as exhibits to the motion to clarify the point you are making to the judge. At that point, those documents will make it into the public record and will be in PACER.

Even if something isn't filed in court, if the court case is USA v. TechBro, for instance, then as the USA is a governmental entity it is subject to FOIA and you can often get a copy of all the discovery that way. I often use FOIA just to avoid PACER fees.

I hope that they also start talking about making the court trials public on live streams in federal cases. Currently only state cases are public streamed and even that's up to the discretion of the judge. Having live stream of all trials would be enormously beneficial to society.

This is nice. Something similar for state courts would be great too. One of the things I do when deciding on a doctor or lawyer or other professional who I'm otherwise not qualified to evaluate is check and see how many times they've been sued and for what.

In retrospect, bravo, it seems like common sense that things that the People pay for should be freely available, as they're the ones purchasing it ostensibly by paying taxes.

it does make me wonder how much semiprivate data exists in the archives that was largely kept private through obscurity and small barriers to access.

yes, court records are public records... but how much was allowed to go in unredacted knowing that no technology existed to scrape or search it effectively? would the behavior of the courts change with respect to what gets archived if every filed document were easily queried and reviewed by anyone?

like, for example, does this increase the likelihood that a protected witness would be unmasked by a data mining blogger?

PACER's paywall is bullshit, but just to temper things it does allow you to download a certain amount for free. I think it might be something like $30 a month. All my requests usually come in under this amount.

What are the fees if you go to the courthouse? I've actually never been inside a federal courthouse despite litigating there for almost a decade. I assume they have an indigency application if you can't afford their fees - the state courts I've worked at do.

You have a 1st Amendment right to court documents (and usually a constitutional or statutory right under state laws too). I don't know exactly how fees interact with your 1st Am. right. I would imagine that if you wanted a lot of documents and couldn't afford them that your 1st Am. right would win if you sued for it.

> The CBO’s cost Dec. 2020 estimate to build the new system was in the mid-two-digit millions, though given the fees that the AO is collecting from power users and agencies, the appropriation would more likely need to be in the single-digit millions, at most.

What? Double digit millions for a CRUD app for public information?

Because the scale of PACER is absolutely insane.

> Because the scale of PACER is absolutely insane.

...is it, though? It's fucking 2021. Interns play with petabytes. Literally.

CRUD on massive datasets is not a hard problem anymore. Or, at least, isn't eight digits and 10 years hard.

> Interns play with petabytes. Literally.

Most interns don't. Most industry veterans don't either.

Most interns and industry veterans don't write wordpress plugins either ;-)

The point is that you can learn enough of the basics to do useful things in 3 months with minimal prior experience.

Working with petabytes of data isn't a "hard" problem like it was 10 years ago. IDK how large PACER is, and I'm not suggesting that an intern could implement a new system, but $x0,000,000 and a decade of lead time is at least an order of magnitude off.

As someone who's gotten into reading law related stuff, this is amazing news.

You know a bill means nothing when no one votes against it

Can someone familiar explain why the AO thinks it would take $2 BILLION and 9 years to implement? Similarly (on a significantly smaller scale), why would it take $XX Million and 3 years to implement?

From a total noobs perspective (mine), it seems that all they would have to do is remove the paywall; assumedly there was already a security review of the product, so this should involve removing blockers and not necessarily reimplementing the wheel.

Where do those numbers and estimates come from? They seem wildly inflated to someone not in the govt industry, but I assume (perhaps generously) that there is some internal logic behind it...

State and local jurisdictions are even worse. It is nearly impossible to see what lawsuits someone has been involved with. I have no idea how anyone could truly do a national search of every county courthouse. All if them are behind paywalls or on paper.

It just boggles the mind that in a society ruled by laws, access to said laws would be locked up behind a paywall.

It's not that unusual. PACER's pricing was ridiculous, but, in principle and from a historical perspective, having to pay for access to information has been the norm. And for understandable reasons. Only a generation ago, access to court records naturally cost money, because neither paper nor file clerks' time is free.

It's only within the past couple decades that technology has reduced the costs associated with providing public access to court records down to a level where it's easy to contemplate making the service free to all users as part of the public budget.

I was shocked the first time I needed to download something from PACER and saw that the pricing was per-page (of a PDF!)

Per-page is pretty common in the legal industry generally. It's a holdover from the paper days, when the provider's costs were more a function of page count than document count.

The old "He who has the gold makes the rules" trick works even better when those without the gold only get to learn the rules when & where convenient to those with. Or they have to give up whatever silver they've managed to scrape together in order to learn some of the current rules.

It reminds me of how ISO standards, from date specifications, to the hz for the musical note "A", to railway engineering, have to be purchased from ISO just for the PDF.

> It reminds me of how ISO standards, from date specifications, to the hz for the musical note "A", to railway engineering, have to be purchased from ISO just for the PDF.

At eye-watering rates.

https://webstore.ansi.org/Search/Find?st=iso&v=5&cp=1&f1=Sta...

They are not. Court of appeals decisions (a decision that's of precedential value) and any district court decision of importance are public already.

This makes public district court opinions nobody cares about (ok I suppose), as well as the pleadings and motions filed by the parties in the case. Those documents contain a treasure trove of private information that wasn't disclosed with the expectation of broad public dissemination.

Terrible news.

Federal court isn't personal information mother lode that state courts would be, but there's all sorts of stuff in there that doesn't need to be widely disseminated. If you're just interested in the occasional document, that's already free. This is just going to enable the worst sort of data harvesting.

I understand your concern, but you're advocating for a form of security-through-obscurity. Data harvesting of this information is already available to bad actors. If information must be private for security reasons, it should not be in the public court records in the first place.

It’s already available to anyone. Your first $X / month is free, and after that, it’s like $.10 page. Or, you can drive to the courthouse and snoop for free all day long.

Mostly, this just facilitates more adtech and profile building. I don’t see the benefit.

Can you provide a citation for the proposition that rate-limiting is a form of security-through-obscurity? That seems like a pretty novel interpretation to me.

This information pre-dates the internet age. Lots of sensitive personal info.

Courts already allow you to request that documents be flagged as sensitive.

I think you're right. Pacer is basically free for any of us wanting to look something up reasonably. The people that care are the people that want to harvest the data contained therein and sell it, use it for extortion, or use it to deny the reformed ex-con underclass access to housing, jobs and credit.

I suspect any professional law office that needs to research precedent, any legal journalist, etc will quickly exceed the $30/month. But yes, for normal people engaging in democracy it's effectively free.

$30 is 300 pages. That's nothing. Many people engaging in democracy need much more.

The pricing is per page, not per document. One larger document can go over the free threshold.

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