mlissner

That'd be a win, but to our knowledge, no.

Yes, very true, thanks. Another interesting angle is how DOJ can subpoena tech co's for, say, location information, but defense attorneys can't. So if you want exculpatory data, you have fewer avenues for getting it. The deck is stacked in a lot of ways against the defense.

Right, you can usually find opinions, but in many cases, that's because the provider you're using — WestLaw, Bloomberg, Justia, Google Scholar, whatever — paid for it on your behalf. They (we) have to go to PACER and buy these things too.

Good point! https://free.law/contact/

I'm chiming in a lot, but this is only sort of true. In theory, yes, opinions and orders are free on PACER. In practice clerks have to check a box when they upload each opinion to mark it as free, and yeah....some clerks do a great job. Others do terribly. Some info here: https://free.law/pacer-facts/#written-opinions-are-free-on-p...

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-...

I'm the director of Free Law Project, the org that makes RECAP. We're always looking for help with the extension, our APIs, etc. We have a new project, for example, we're working on called the "PACER Pray and Pay Project". It'll let you pray for a document and have somebody else buy it for you. Lots of stuff in the works. If folks are looking to help an open source org, we'd love to hear from you.

It gets even worse than that. Many pages are charged by the number of results or the length of the page generated. But you don't know the price until you load it and see how long the page is. Most have a cap of $3, but some don't, so when you press that button to load the next page, sometimes it just costs $100 and you really had no way to know it'd happen until it did. PACER is terrible.

Hi, founder of Free Law Project here. Actually, the DOJ is the biggest PACER user and they pay a ton of money on PACER each year. Somebody FOIA'ed it a few years back, and it totals about $3-4M/year. https://free.law/pacer-facts/#what-if-i%E2%80%99m-a-governme...

I (the director of Free Law Project) agree with a lot of the other responses here, but I'll just add two points. First, technically PACER isn't a website. If you ask the judiciary, they'll tell you that PACER is only the public access system. So it's nuts that it rakes in $150M/year considering that Congress said they can only charge money for PACER to the extent it pays for itself. All of us that work on / use / think about PACER need to reframe this in our minds. PACER is not a website! (We're as guilty of this as anybody.) So...how much should it cost to run a basic credential system?

The second point is this: When should the gov't charge fees for services? Should cops cost money when they come help you? Schools? Yes, the fees help the gov't survive when Congress can't set a budget, but is that worth it or should our basic legal documents be freely available just like the courthouse itself is?

Everything out of the Mueller report, frankly. It's history-making stuff. https://free.law/featured-cases/special-counsel/

We're thinking about that, actually! There are a couple hard parts though:

1. How do you know which documents to buy with the donated credits?

2. How do you get access to the user's account? Do you store their password somewhere?

Maybe a simple trick would be to throw a little alert with the extension around the end of the quarter just to say, "Hey, it's the end of the quarter. Have you spent your entire free budget?"

Hm. There's an opportunity here, but we've never quite nailed it down.

Send me an email: mike@free.law. We can take a look. I don't know of any jurisdictions that have that issue, but it could be an emerging pattern or one we've missed.

Yeah, we had some outage yesterday. Docker seems to be opening files and then not closing them again, which causes issues sooner or later. Sorry about that. The one redeeming thing with this is when this happens we're usually still getting your uploads, just not processing them. Anyway, sorry.

> Also, is there any way you could upload documents that members of a case get for free through Pacer?

Yeah, we've experimented with that, but haven't gotten it nailed down yet. If somebody wanted to help, especially somebody with free-look access, we'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for posting this! I'm the executive director of Free Law Project. If anybody has any questions or comments, I'm happy to chat!

The important thing about a trademark is that you start using it. If you run into a problem with somebody else using your name, the most important thing will be who used it first, not who TM'ed it first. In fact, if they TM a name that you had first, you can claw the name and the TM away from them.

Unless you are expecting somebody to steal/abuse your name, there's no rush to TM.

No, businesses are saying that it's libel or slander or something else, and if you responded to their suit by saying anything about your first amendment rights, your be laughed out of court.

Yelp's message should be about libel and slander and things like that.

This first amendment says the government can't abridge your speech. The government is not doing that here, so mentioning the first amendment adds more confusion to the concept of free speech than it adds clarity. It's about as useful as mentioning any of the other amendments.

That doesn't actually create a properly encrypted connection. It only encrypts between the user and the site (at CloudFlare), not between the site and Github. Without that last hop being encrypted, you have to weigh whether this is an improvement or not.

Right, flipped that in my mind. Thanks.

Structured Settlements are the ridiculous deals whereby I buy money that's owed to you for pennies on the dollar. Say you reached a settlement that pays you $500/month for 30 years, that's $180k over 30 years. But if I offered you $20k, today, you might take it, if you had developmental problems.[1]

Well, structured settlements need a judge's signature to go through, with the theory that the judge reviews the deal to make sure it's fair.

Except this guy just went ahead and forged the signature.

[1]: More on this here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/how-compa...

You mean to RSS feeds instead of going to actual websites?

yeah, I don't get this suggestion at all. They say that:

> This option comes with a coordination penalty, but results in a much more predictable behavior

In general, I'd much rather the greater throughput over predictable behavior. In general, I'm not watching my queue and having it be predictable isn't a very high priority.

I think it's a reasonable question and I'm a big fan of piwik, but running it at this kind of scale is very hard. We get about 10k hits/day on the piwik instance we run and it's consistently taking more resources than the application it's tracking.

What's weird though is that they have a consortium. They could have all agreed simultaneously to stop issuing SHA1 certs years ago and at no market loss. But they didn't.

Sorry - What's the point you're making about your girlfriend?

We're actually working on solving some of these problems at my non-profit, http://freelawproject.org:

- We've built https://www.courtlistener.com to provide a powerful search system with millions of opinions and scrapers for lots of jurisdictions.

- We have the RECAP project that ingests content from PACER: https://www.recapthelaw.org

- We'll start collecting an archive of oral arguments soon (just got funding for that, if all goes smoothly).

Everything we do is open source and open access, so hopefully if we fail, people will take our code and content and keep it alive.

You're right that it's a big challenge, but I think we're making some headway.

that plan was canceled.

Another approach, for the lazy, is to just push the photos to Google auto backup. If you do that it'll automatically figure out that they can be stitched together and will provide you with the image. Works very well in my experience and requires no effort at all.

As the lead dev of the non-profit, it's exciting to see it appear here. We've been working on this project for four years now. The legal world is a tough one when it comes to technology: Lawyers are conservative and risk adverse, the players are entrenched, and the content is either locked up in books or in rough shape for text processing.

This is a fully open open project, and we love feedback, code reviews, ideas, volunteers, you name it. Any help we can get is great to have.