Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon373839 | Hacker News Reader

I actually approve of the something closer to the status quo here. Court filings contain a lot of sensitive information about the litigants.

It is one thing for the records to be publicly available, as they must be. It is a very different thing for every speck of material in them to be instantly available to anyone, anywhere, worldwide, for any purpose.

View on HN

Material that shouldn't be published for any reason is already subject to a sealing process. What else is needed?

Just one example: PII of third parties is frequently attached in evidence supporting motions. In theory, careful redaction should be done, but it isn't, and those third parties aren't around to assert their privacy interests.

So wealthy people can go ahead and violate your privacy interests, but not really anyone else? I’m sorry, but this is a bad answer to the problem. The solution is to fix the redaction process, not to go with some awkward indirect solution that creates its own set of problems WITHOUT solving the original stated problem.

That's orthogonal to PACER fees. There's already a system in place for redacting and sealing documents that aren't suitable for public consumption. To a first approximation, ~everything on PACER is available to anybody, for free, because the billing threshold (before which there's no charge) is pretty high.

Isn't that basically the same as saying court filings should be available, but not to poor people?

No. Indigent users can already request fee exemptions, and that can be expanded. Access can be provided at courthouses and public libraries. (I don’t know if that is already a practice for PACER specifically, but it should be.)

There's "can't afford" and "can't justify the expense". I'm certainly not poor and at basically no amount above free would I justify the expense. So any cost is completely unacceptable, especially given how much the public pays to produce these results. No more excuses, no more lame justifications, no more hiding.

PACER fees are waived if they are under $15 per quarter.

That's about 150 pages of material.

$30/quarter, so ~300 pages. Also noticed that the fee is capped at $3/document, but I don't know how often a single document is longer then 30 pages.

Thanks, I think they raised the limit in the last few years and I forgot.

I have definitely gone over the limit for single documents in the past, although I've never been over the quarterly waiver limit. Judicial opinions and hearing trancripts often exceed 30 pages.

You can easily burn through hundreds of dollars researching one or two relatively small court cases. I don't think you should be indigent or go to the courthouse/public library to avoid spending hundreds of dollars for that small amount of research.

No. They should be available for legit use cases and not available for data scrapers who will use it to facilitate algorithmic housing and employment discrimination. Especially not available for scammers who make mugshot extortion websites.

Agreed. The issue isn't with individuals having access to the data but with aggregation of said data.

In these cases a heavily redacted sentence is made public, and it is common in sensitive cases to keep the names of victims and/or witnesses concealed. Think crimes involving children and such.

Then why do you think they should be public?

Because “publicly available with some friction” has a fundamentally different character than “indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers”. That type of information access wasn't even fathomable when the concept of public records was born. It enables a lot of uses where I would argue that the harms outweigh the benefits.

Yeah, I think this is a bad take on the part of the EFF.

The full dataset will be in private hands and available everywhere to everyone to do anything the moment this goes live.

I protect data for a living, cost asymmetry and proof of work are really the only tools we have.

If this goes live, the next time I get subpoenaed to testify for something I'm going to throw in so many random but couched accusations at people just to screw them over when the data goes live at scale via data brokers and torrent dumps.

Bill Jones (accused in court testimony of killing puppies) is requesting the HOA get off of his back.

I see a valid point here, however, some court rulings create binding precedents. As I understand it, those can be paywalled in PACER. Binding precedents are part of the law everyone within the relevant jurisdiction is required to obey, and it is unjust for any part of the law to not be freely available.

It may be reasonable to put limits on free public access to records where there's a privacy concern.

At least within the federal court system, binding precedent is already freely available. Only circuit courts and SCOTUS can create binding precedent, and the opinions of those courts are freely available on their respective sites, outside of PACER. E.g., here's the 9th circuit: https://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/decisions/opinions/

That's good to know. I did not know circuit court opinions were always available.

The current system still doesn't sit right with me. Someone sufficiently wealthy has effectively unlimited access. Someone sufficiently poor with a lot of time on their hands might also have unlimited access. Everyone in the middle has a bottleneck.

> indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers

Any fee that is acceptable for "normal use" is not high enough to deter the likes of Google or the big AI developers.

Google, a company that custom develops specialized automobiles to regularly drive ~all the streets in the world for the purposes of having imagery for a mapping app. Google, a company that (before it even got really rich), developed custom book-scanning technology to scan all the books it could acquire.

The big AI providers are in litigation now because even licensing terms that prevent use are no deterrent, they just stole the content they wanted to train their models.

The fee won't deter the cases you want, it will only harm the rest of us.

"Because “publicly available with some friction” has a fundamentally different character than “indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers”"

people have already forgotten the lessons of all those mugshots websites.

Just trying to remind people that in most countries outside the US, there is nothing like PACER. Even in the UK, it's usually just judgments that are freely available, see https://www.bailii.org/ and https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/. Even with the recent expected extension of "Public Documents", accessing the claim form or other statements of cases will depend on the court making an order https://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/procedure-rules/civil/rule....

And for non-common law jurisdictions, even the UK level of publicity of judgments is rarely available - anonymisation is a prerequisite: https://homoki.net/en/2024/02/01/On_Anonymisation_of_court_d...

So, for many countries, it's not just that sealed documents are not accessible, many people in traditional democracies couldn't imagine and bear this level of publicity for every court document like you have in the US.

I think it should be public to be a general check the public can engage with against judges, cops, and court participants.

Consider cases like Cash for Kids. It potentially could have been caught a lot quicker if we had the data publicly available to see "How does this judge usually rule". Today, proving that a judge has is bias is pretty hard, but imagine if we could see "This judge always denies motions when the claimant or their lawyers are Irish".

Or consider dirty cops. Imagine being able to search all the drug arrests of a cop and finding out "Hmm, this cop is finding meth on everyone he pulls over". That's a valuable tool for the next victim of the cop that gets accused of meth possession. As it currently stands, we basically rely on the cop not forgetting to cover their cameras.

Having more data available makes it easier systematic analysis and mining a whole lot easier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com