Federal courts make it more expensive to access records (PACER update) | Hacker News Reader

Federal courts make it more expensive to access records (PACER update)

techdirt.com

30 pointsgrellas13 comments

Only when it assists in denying the public visibility into the operation of the government do things in the tech world get MORE expensive over time.

Well that and transfer caps from ISPs getting lower (or more expensive for the same cap) over time.

I don't even get how they can charge for these public records. They should be free. I wonder if a lawyer could sue to make them free???

They're not charging for the records, they're charging for use of the PACER system.. It's supposed to cover the cost of serving up the documents, but there's a huge surplus. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/09/federal-cour... It's not like they're claiming the documents are copyrighted or anything.

>It's not like they're claiming the documents are copyrighted or anything.

no, you don't need to claim anything when FBI is watching for your financial interests :

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/swartz-fbi/

The FBI is the normal agency that would look into potential fraud cases involving a federal program like the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. The AO told the FBI that Swartz was using someone else's credentials to access the system. That turned out not to be true, but I don't blame the FBI for investigating him. Anyway they just called him a couple of times and then dropped the issue, so I'm going to say that's not much of a deterrent.

>Anyway they just called him a couple of times and then dropped the issue, so I'm going to say that's not much of a deterrent.

actually he lawyer-ed up, and it is when they stepped back.

>The FBI is the normal agency that would look into potential fraud cases involving a federal program like the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.

the millions of documents were downloaded without paying the fee. Either the download is the act of fraud or charging the fee is the act of fraud. The FBI decided the former. They let the Swartz go just because price/benefit analysis didn't look that good for them as he refused to be an easy target.

>that's not much of a deterrent.

it is enough deterrent for me. While i think these documents must be public domain, and i do think the letter of law supports that opinion, given the chance i'd not download them and, God forbid, publish/torrent them. The FBI investigation would be enough to ruin any prospects of high-tech job for me, ie. to ruin my life.

Oh, I thought it was taking the documents using someone else's authorization that was fraud.

The court library allowed free access. He did the equivalent of revisiting the grocery store's free sample kiosk over and over again. The FBI knew he did it and could prove it. You think they're going to shy away from an easy conviction after they spent money on the investigation? They just came to the realization that what he did probably wasn't a criminal act.

Does this mean that I could download each document out of PACER once, and publish it to a world-readable Amazon S3 bucket? (The type where each user pays their own S3 costs to download from it)

There is a firefox extension that does something similar: https://www.recapthelaw.org/

However, the gov is not amused: http://www.pacer.gov/announcements/general/exemptnotice.html

So, as long as you pay the fee once, they don't mind. But the ToS of the fee exemption says you lose your exemption when you use RECAP. That's not great, but it doesn't mean that they object to normal use of RECAP.

Yup! There is no limitation on the redistribution of the documents. In fact, there is no copyright claim at all, so you can make derivative works and then claim copyright on those yourself!

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