Court Records Should Be Free

cdolan•about 1 hour ago

courtlistener and the Recap program fill a vital niche at the moment.

Recap takes any PACER document you purchase and automatically adds it to CourtListener for others to see/download.

Hopefully it will become obsolete soon!

alexpotato•36 minutes ago

So interesting point about things being public vs not:

If congressional votes are private, you never REALLY know if your congressperson is actually voting in your best interests. You only see certain bills pass and if they are in your favor, you can probably make some assumptions if they voted or not.

If the votes are public, now EVERYONE can see who they voted for. That sounds great! Then you realize that lobbyists can also see who the congressperson voted for. Lobbyists that have a lot more money and influence than you do. Lobbyists that can hold back millions if the vote is against their interests.

My point isn't that one format isn't better than the other. My point is that there are "no solutions, only tradeoffs"

fogof•18 minutes ago

Do you think there is a tradeoff in this case? If so, what is the best counterargument against making PACER records free? I think it's important to note, as the article does, that these records are already "public" (that's what the "P" stands for) what's at issue is whether you should be charged a fee to access them.

functionmouse•10 minutes ago

ban lobbying

musicale•about 1 hour ago

Free to humans possibly.

panny•about 4 hours ago

>The bill would replace the aging PACER and CM/ECF systems with a modern, unified platform designed to improve public access, strengthen cybersecurity, and reduce long-term costs.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Grazester•about 3 hours ago

Isn't the replacement for CM/ECF, ACMS?

stainablesteel•about 1 hour ago

there was a website for this

https://courtwatch.us/

anon373839•about 1 hour ago

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.

EMIRELADERO•40 minutes ago

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

monooso•41 minutes ago

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

anon373839•29 minutes ago

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.)

DangitBobby•18 minutes ago

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.

nonethewiser•44 minutes ago

Then why do you think they should be public?

anon373839•40 minutes ago

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.

fellowniusmonk•24 minutes ago

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.

Court Records Should Be Free

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