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.

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.

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.

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.