PlainSite bans federal courts from accessing court data | Hacker News Reader

PlainSite bans federal courts from accessing court data

plainsite.org

97 pointsthinkcomp15 comments

Much ado by tech guys who are complaining about a law they apparently have not bothered to read. The courts are not required to provide free public access to court documents, they are simply cannot charge more than is necessary to maintain the e-filing/docket system. See sec. 205 in the pdf linked by their post.

"We examined the Courts’ budget documents from the past few years, and we discovered that the Courts claim PACER expenses of roughly $25 million per year. But in 2010, PACER users paid about $90 million in fees to access the system [5]."

https://www.recapthelaw.org/2012/01/10/recap-featured-in-xrd...

I operate PlainSite on a budget of far less than $5,000 per year. It's far more advanced than PACER in a number of ways. Even multiplying PlainSite's budget by a factor of 100 to account for features that PACER has but PlainSite does not, you still get pretty close to zero on a cost-per-page basis.

To expand on that, PACER charges $0.10 per "page." A single pageview can count as multiple pages, depending on length. They charge for not just actual docs, but for search queries, viewing the docket sheet, etc.

The rate is clearly not commensurate with the cost to maintain the system.

Maybe it would be helpful to modify "entitled free of charge on PACER" to a phrasing that includes information about how the charges are unreasonable.

I happen to know that under the law, PACER access is not required to be "free of charge", and thus the rest of the statement falls flat. Even though I agree that PACER pricing is out of touch with the law due it's pricing being well above the costs required to maintain the system.

While I'm not sure of your target audience with your statement, it's clear that on some level federal employees of the court system are included. They may also know "free of charge" is not what the law says, and thus it may also undermine your argument with them as well.

There is already a link in the statement to this letter, which is quite detailed:

http://www.thinkcomputer.org/20120209.pacer.pdf

Furthermore, many at the courts have read this blog post:

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=84

They are well aware of what is going on.

Access is free if viewed from a federal courthouse terminal. While it's not necessarily convenient it is worth mentioning that a free option exists.

http://www.pacer.gov/documents/epa_feesched.pdf

Not really. You can't save files and the courts I've been to charge $0.25 per page to print if you can print at all.

By 'save' do you mean locally, or do they also disallow email, dropbox, etc? (I think it's great what you're doing regardless; I ask only to more clearly assess their intentionality in all this...)

The court workstations are Dell Optiplex machines running Firefox on Linux configured to visit one and only one web site: PACER. The local filesystem is locked.

Jeeesus. So this ain't even a "don't hate the player" situation -- they are the game?

What kind of connection does the monitor have to the workstation?

The man against the State.

Posted by the same guy who invented facebook and mobile payments, people should listen really closely to this genius!

spare us the ad hominem

I'm not sure it's entirely ad hominem to point out past PR stunts and quixotic crusades.

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