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Comment by monooso | Hacker News Reader

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.

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