Comment by law | Hacker News Reader

Comment by law | Hacker News Reader

I don't sign petitions, because that type of feel-good inaction is one of the major problems in America today. Instead, I support the efforts of Carl Malamud at public.resource.org and am trying to figure out a way to crowdsource PACER. Admittedly, these efforts differ substantively from the petition's goal of 'liberating' publicly-funded research from the shackles of for-profit corporations, but many of the issues are analogous.

The most serious problem with PACER (which is the online docket system for federal courts) is that each 'page' costs the user $0.10, which precludes any meaningful search or analysis of data. I fear that if the government were to provide access to research articles and the like, they may institute similar measures to profit from the availability of this information. I realize that this is an unsubstantiated fear, but it's extremely important to consider how to implement such policies.

Remember, these publishers' very existence depends on profiting from access to journal articles. As such, they will literally fight to the death over this issue.

From talking to the White House, I know that they are taking a great interest in this particular petition. They are looking to see how much public support there is for free public access to taxpayer-funded research. It is only with a public mandate that they will be able to push through open access legislation against the objections of the journal industry.

There is a very direct relationship between how much support this petition gets, and how willing the White House, and members of Congress, will be, in the short term, to push through open access legislation.

I agree that your work crowdsourcing PACER will have a far greater positive impact on American democracy than my signing this petition.

But it's not like I or anyone else who signs this petition is going to dust off our hands afterwards and say, "Ok done with politics."

The difference between this and other online petitions is that the White House will respond to it if it reaches 25,000 signers. Which should be in about 6.68 days, give or take.[1]

In the past these responses have oft been positive. At minimum they have been thoughtful.

Remember a political outcry, in part expressed through petitions, has worked in the recent past: it derailed SOPA.

None of the smaller political acts (petitions, letters to congressmen, debates with friends) are sufficient. But they are necessary.

[1](25,000 - current signatures) / (current signatures / days since creation)

I'm genuinely curious, what would you do with the data?

Please do not read this the wrong way. I am not questioning what you're doing as improper. I am just curious.

Isn't most of the data in PACER just procedural (cf. substantive)? If yes, wouldn't it have only limited value in illuminating to the public "what the law is"? Would it have some other value? Maybe it might allow generation of some interesting statistics on outcomes, etc.? Maybe you are planning to "disrupt" the jury research industry?

Pardon my ignorance.

(Personally, I think you should also support freeing up access to academic research. Public access to research publications is equally as important as access to the total corpus of US Court dockets. I'm not sure anyone could learn that much just by reading court dockets. But I can assure you that by reading the scientific literature in a given field of science, one can learn a great deal.)

What I want to do with the data is largely irrelevant; I care more about being free to analyze this data--data that belongs to the public.

But to answer your question more precisely, I'm interested in identifying trends in the courts with respect to litigated issues. It'd be interesting to determine whether certain pre-trial motions have a higher propensity to be granted/denied in a particular court, before a particular judge, etc. Additionally, I'm interested in tracking cases on which attorneys and law firms typically rely when writing their briefs or other documents submitted to the court.

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