PACER Fee Battle Pits Nonprofits, Supporters Against Government (bloomberglaw.com) 24
Three nonprofits will ask the Federal Circuit this week to consider a Goldilocks question: whether fees the government charges to access court records are too high, too low, or just right. From a report: The nonprofits say the fees violate federal law because they're higher than what's needed to operate the system. They represent a certified class of 1.4 million users of the federal judiciary's Public Access to Court Records (PACER) system. The federal court system has come under fire for how it operates PACER, which processed more than 500 million requests for case information last fiscal year. Critics argue the pay system reduces transparency and erodes public trust in the courts. The government argues it's authorized to charge fees that exceed the cost of operating PACER and use the money for other court access projects. A lower court said PACER fees should be "just right," in that they should cover services that provide public access to electronic court information, but not pay for other court technology projects. Both sides appealed to the Federal Circuit. Fees for downloading a copy of a filing run 10 cents per page, up to $3 per document. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts collected more than $145 million in fees in 2014 alone, according to the complaint.
Re: No comments (Score:1)
This whole "goldilocks" fallacy is condescending and an insult to our intelligence. Am I being read a bedtime story by a nanny with a room temp IQ? If there is no price discovery, there is no way to know what the product is worth. This is also a false dichotomy. Is the price too high or too low? Why does it have to be either? This is based on an assumption that there is value or merit in the first place.
The best criminal justice system! (Score:3)
... that money can buy.
Are the courts 'allowed' to do this? (Score:2)
That is, does the enabling law permit them to charge fees in excess of expenses to fund other operations?
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The text of the law reads:
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"reimburse expenses incurred in providing these services"
Which seems to answer my real question - funding other services is outside the scope of this... Oh, I meant unauthorized.
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No it targets the question of whether public accessible records are or are not publicly accessible. Once you place a charge on those records they are no longer publicly accessible they are only privately accessible, do not pay the fee, you are denied access to those records and as such they are no longer public, they are not privatised for profit records. The government must provided freely all matters of public record if they are to remain legally publicly accessible. Access to those records is something t
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In other words, the law is unconstitutional and should be repealed or ignored, courts should make these records available without fees, deriving their necessary revenue by some other means, perhaps filing fees, and we should reject their attempts to make public records inaccessible by requiring specific fees.
I mostly agree with you. My complaint was a sidebar, does the law permit them to charge fees for records to fund other court activities? I hope not, filing fees and such make sense there. But the argume
Throw the bastards out. (Score:4, Insightful)
Distribution of public records is one of those things that should be payed for with tax money.
Putting the PACER database online is something that could be done for a pittance.
Hell, if we just allowed people to put the database online, it would happen.
The law should not be secret.
Let's pass a federal law that makes it a crime to prevent or interfere with people who publish public information.
No copyright on laws, or other public records.
Re: Throw the bastards out. (Score:2)
Youâ(TM)re not paying for it. Federal taxes donâ(TM)t âoe pay forâ federal expenditures. The federal government creates the money and has no intrinsic need for the actual dollars.
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Because they're spending more money to collect and account for the fees than it would cost to just let anyone who wants download the document.
We no longer live in an era where transmitting the documents requires long distance charges or the cost of having someone copy and snail mail them.
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In fact, a large part of the costs of running the public access part of the system probably has to do with managing the collection of payments.
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Let's pass a federal law
Yeah, let's... All we need is a congress that will do it, and, voila! Anyone know where we can find one?
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Free or just cover PACER costs (Score:4, Insightful)
I argue that the PACER system should provide data for free (i.e., covered by the general tax fund as an essential government service) OR at most just charge for the costs of actually running the PACER system.
Free because these are supposed to be public records, and the public shouldn't have to pay to see public records. However, it is possible that PACER costs are being driven by a small community of users (accessors) that are inflating the costs, in which case fees may need to be charged to prevent an undue impact to the general fund. In that case, the fees should just recover PACER costs.
The idea of using a popular access service's fee-generated revenue to offset other government costs has some appeal, but the potential for abuse is very high and so should be avoided.
Re: Free or just cover PACER costs (Score:2)
The system could literally be run on less than $10M a year end to end.
Re: Free or just cover PACER costs (Score:4, Informative)
I'm a former CM/ECF (the actual name of PACER) administrator in both district and bankruptcy courts. You have no idea what's involved in running those systems.
There are 94 federal districts, each containing a district and a bankruptcy court, and eleven circuits, each containing one court of appeals. That's 199 CM/ECF instances, each one customized in a way to make the local judges happy.
Each one of those instances has an government LAN attached instance (CM/ECF) and an externally available instance (PACER), so that's 398 VMs. For each inside/outside set, there is a live instance, a testing instance, and a training instance. That's 1,194 VMs.
Then, for each one of those 1,194 instances, there's a set of failover instances. That's another 1,194 replicated instances in a different data center than the main one, along with all of the shit that goes along with being able to handle an immediate failover in case of emergency.
Remember, PACER isn't just "that thing where you can look at court filings". It's literally the backbone of the entire federal court system. All of the people in all of the clerks offices in all of the courts in the country do their work on it all day, every day. If it's not working, literally no one is working. Each court has a team of 2-6 people whose job it is to keep that working. If you think you can do that for $4,200 per instance per year, you're welcome to try.
You might think "just centralize all of to a small set of instances shared across all courts", but that's never going to happen. The judges at each court have absolute control over the way the court is run, right down to the filing procedures, the format of the caption at the start of every filing, the fonts, everything. Any solution that inhibits their ability to do whatever the fuck they want whenever the fuck they want to isn't going to fly.
To give you an example of how nitpicky some of them are, for a while, I worked with a judge who had a specification for paper clip usage on paperwork submitted to him. Jumbo, non-skid, one inch from the right-hand side of the paper. If you used a smooth paperclip, the paper was rejected. Paperclip in the wrong place? Rejected. Standard-sized paperclip? Rejected. If you think that they're going to tolerate being told that their captions have to use square brackets instead of parentheses as delimiters, you're dreaming.
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Exactly. As far as the internal system is concerned, it should just throw a copy over the wall to a public access system and be done with it.
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All of the items you're calling out, including the need to customize the product, would be there regardless of providing that data to the public. How much of the cost of CM/ECF is to support the public access component?
Why is access to the information funding the judge's specific local requirements instead of coming out of their budget?
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