Hacker News Reader

Comment by awinter-py | Hacker News Reader

this is right if pacer is expensive to operate for a real reason

but 1) it has high revenue which 2) is required to go to expenses, which 3) it may not be going to expenses

(per freelaw project, at least https://free.law/2016/11/14/pacer-revenue/)

courtlistener is providing a much better service at no cost to the public through donations; it's reasonable to say 'govt is required to feed new data to courtlistener and friends', gov doesn't have to operate pacer anymore, everyone is happy

View on HN

My expectation would be that the costs of operating the PACER system encompass a lot of basic costs of handling filing and docket management that aren't relevant to passive consumers of PACER, but that don't have a clean interface to charge at otherwise, in much the same way that gas taxes are in significant part a tax to fund maintenance of roadways.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570

> I'm the director of Free Law Project. For the case mentioned in the article we actually did a full expert testimony figuring out roughly how much per page it'd cost to run PACER using AWS GovCloud and a handful of other assumptions. It was...half a ten thousandth of a penny per page, IIRC:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-...

Government’s PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158 - August 2020 (149 comments)

That's missing my point. I too believe that the cost of serving static files is effectively epsilon. But that's not all PACER fees pay for.

Your point is taken, it’s simply a philosophical debate between public funding and user fees, and if the system is exposing the right folks to the relevant majority of costs vs socializing the costs broadly. My position is that if the costs are relatively insignificant, socializing them is simply more efficient. I accept others may have a different philosophical take. I suppose user and landing fees in US general and commercial aviation are a similar analogy for comparison in the support of fee collection.

fwiw the US judiciary agrees with you https://www.uscourts.gov/file/62983/download

> The judiciary opposes measures that shift the costs of providing access to PACER to litigants filing cases in federal courts, unduly hindering access to justice

That's their response to the open courts act of 2021, which would have made pacer free.

As a user of both courtlistener and pacer, I mostly believe freelaw can deliver a better cheaper equivalent than what exists, even including the submission systems. (With the caveat that I have used state court e-file systems but only briefly touched the federal ones).

If pacer revenue is paying the filing clerks, I probably feel differently; clerks are necessary components of the system who cannot be replaced by technology today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com