Bill To Tear Down Federal Courts' Paywall Gains Momentum in Congress (arstechnica.com) 82
The House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved the Open Courts Act -- legislation to overhaul PACER, the federal courts' system for accessing public documents. The proposal would guarantee free public access to judicial documents, ending the current practice of charging 10 cents per page for many documents -- as well as search results. From a report: The bill must still be passed by the full House and the Senate and signed by the president. With Election Day just seven weeks away, the act is unlikely to become law during this session of Congress. Still, the vote is significant because it indicates the breadth of congressional support for tearing down the PACER paywall. The legislation is co-sponsored by Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), whose bill we covered in 2018, and a fellow Georgian, Democrat Hank Johnson. Prior to Tuesday's vote of the House Judiciary Committee, the bill received a strong endorsement from Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). "It is indefensible that the public must pay fees, and unjustifiably high fees at that, to know what is happening in their own courts," Nadler said.
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
The notion that the laws and rules that govern a land might be inaccessible to its people is abhorrent. You cannot follow, challenge, consent to, or disagree with that which you do not know.
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The court already has those digital documents stored for its own internal use. It already has a website. Connecting point A to point B is an infrastructure improvement project, like a new bridge or highway.
There's no reason whatsoever that there should be a toll system for the public to access it. Everyone pays taxes, everyone should have access to it.
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Yes, and this is why taxation is a thing.
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As authorized by Congress, the program is funded entirely through user fees set by the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body of the federal courts.
If the proposal is to remove the fees, then funding through taxes is required. You just need to convince fellow Americans to do this.
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I'm good with that - just like I'm good w/ my taxes going to NOAA, NASA, DoD, NIH, OSHA, CDC, FBI, DOJ, NSA, CIA, Public Television, POTUS, SCOUTS, and Congress Critters.
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I'm good with that - just like I'm good w/ my taxes going to NOAA, NASA, DoD, NIH, OSHA, CDC, FBI, DOJ, NSA, CIA, Public Television, POTUS, SCOUTS, and Congress Critters.
But not healthcare! Mother of Hey Zues the dancing squirrel, so help me if one dollar of my money goes to pay for someone else's healthcare. I won't stand for it! I will .... not ... mother ... fucking ... titty ... sucking .... two ... balled ... bitch .... stand for it ... do you understand me, Commie Boy???!!!!
I don't want no death squ
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The whole point of the story is that fellow Americans have been convinced enough that Congress is doing something.
Even if there's some sort of fee structure in the future (personal is free, high volume is paid perhaps) PACER funding needs to be overhauled. They're structured around a per-page photocopying fee schedule, which is why the rates are astronomical for today's expect
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The whole point of the story is that fellow Americans have been convinced enough that Congress is doing something.
Not quite. Some Americans don’t want to pay fees to access the documents. But will a majority of Americans care enough about PACER to make this change? I doubt the average American has heard of PACER. I also doubt the average American would support taxes to fund this.
Even if there's some sort of fee structure in the future (personal is free, high volume is paid perhaps) PACER funding needs to be overhauled.
Yes and an overhaul will need to be funded. This will take time and effort. I suspect part of the reason the current system is because Congress could not be bothered to look into this further.
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Not quite. Some Americans don’t want to pay fees to access the documents. But will a majority of Americans care enough about PACER to make this change? I doubt the average American has heard of PACER. I also doubt the average American would support taxes to fund this.
Sir, I sit her offended by your comment. The fellow Americans that I know are quite astute, not to mention, aware of just about every issue large and small. Why, living in the USA is like being trapped in a bastion of hyper-intellectual
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Yes, and this is why taxation is a thing.
Well, sort of. At least at the local level.
Question: Since the US has the constitutional authority to print it's own money ... why does it need yours? (hint: it's not to "pay for stuff")
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Servers cost money. Electricity costs money.
Just curious, have you ever played a game called knifey-spooney?
Cause I think you'd be good at it.
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Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
As authorized by Congress, the program is funded entirely through user fees set by the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body of the federal courts.
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
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The real reason they don't want to change this is the people who directly manage PACER *like* having their own, independent for-profit revenue stream. They're not engaging in the regular kabuki theater of begging for more money or fighting with someone to keep their budget, plus it allows them to build out their own empire.
I mean the right thing here is for some level of basic functionality to just be outright funded by Congress via the appropriation to the Federal court system. Maybe there's some side fe
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Yep. One the other hand (Score:2)
> sure... estimate how much it would cost annually. Then divide that by about 143 million...
Yep, that comes out to - not much at all.
Which is a reasonable way to look at it.
So for example the Pelosi bill at $3 trillion costs $21,000 each. $21,000 is much easier to reason about than $3 trillion spread across the entire country.
Well, 56% pay any federal income tax - 44% aren't going to be paying for this. So the cost is $40,000 from each of us who pay. We can reason avout whether another round is worth
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If justified by providing fair access to public documents, and enacted in a progressive way, yes.
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Those systems already exist via the National Archives. That cost is already being paid.
The National Archives has a system where lawyers nationwide over the Internet can adequately search and retrieve court documents for their purposes? Also the 500 million documents and counting can be easily handled by the National Archives? Or is the purpose of the National Archives different than you assert?
I guess the argument is about whether the National Archives should operate without a deficit and their profits should be bore by the public wanting to access public government documents.
I assume you mean PACER which currently operates solely on these user fees?
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Who paid for the servers and processing?
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As authorized by Congress, the program is funded entirely through user fees set by the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body of the federal courts.
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You misread it. Try again. The operative word was "surplus."
The point was that PACER's fees brought in $145 million in 2015. If it's permitted to collect fees to cover its costs, then either its costs were $145 million (way too high), or it's collecting more fees than needed to cover its costs (which it's not authorized to do).
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Yes, it's running a surplus, and no, it was not authorized by Congress to use surplus funds the way it has been using them.
"[PACER] fees have been funneled into a general-purpose information technology fund that had accumulated a surplus of nearly $150 million as early as 2006." (Note that from the free.law link posted above, PACER was only bringing in about $60 million in annual revenue in 2006; its annual revenue has increased by more than 140% since then.)
"[T]he Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit .
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Perhaps you should read your own link: "An appeals court has ruled it’s fair game for the federal judiciary to charge the public for online access to court records, but that those fees can’t be used as a revenue stream to fund millions of dollars in unrelated IT projects.
No part of that says Congress did not authorize them to set up a surplus. They cannot use funds outside of PACER which the court system has been doing. PACER could build multiple unused server farms if it wanted but it must use
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The cost is so infinitesimal that the idea of charging for it is laughable. I could probably scoop up a spoonful of gravel at a higher cost from my garden. Don't try to defend them, they want barriers to transparency. If it's really that big of an expense just slash some politician's salaries to pay for it.
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Digital copies cost less than paper. They do not cost zero. Servers and processing cost money. Is 10 cents per page too high? Yes. But the cost is not zero.
True, but the the cost of placing and maintaining a paywall greatly increases the cost of running that website. I would not be surprised if the added cost of the paywall is less than the revenue generated by it.
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The cost would depend on how many documents you have to serve up per day. I'd guess 500M docs could average 1M/doc. I'm guessing 100k/page and 10 pages/doc. That would mean about 500TB of storage would be required for the docs, and likely another ~25-100TB to index the data to make it searchable. I'd bet on the low side to store those 500M docs and provide via an Internet connection could be done for maybe $1M/year when you add in the cost of hardware, internet connections, and support to maintain all that.
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The cost would depend on how many documents you have to serve up per day. I'd guess 500M docs could average 1M/doc. I'm guessing 100k/page and 10 pages/doc. That would mean about 500TB of storage would be required for the docs, and likely another ~25-100TB to . . .
I think you missed the point. I could build a system that hold 500 million documents. I can't build a system that allows thousands of lawyers to reliably search and retrieve any document out of 500 million every day. Also these documents do not have an expiration date as they could be cited decades later.
I would think this would be a full time job to maintain a system like this for 3-5 people and it would have to be available 99.999% of the time since it involves judicial matters of all sorts. If you have to allow ten of thousands of searches and downloads per day, that number could grow up to $10M/year or more.
Then present your system to Congress if you have it all figured it out.
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"Then present your system to Congress if you have it all figured it out."
I don't "have it all figured out". What I have figured out is that this is not a trivial problem and the solution will not be free or even nearly free. It would be a nominal cost for the federal government compared to the overall budget, but many people were implying its an easy task that is a no brainer because servers are cheap. And I agree that the bare bones infrastructure to handle the volume of documents wouldn't need to be subst
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It turns out that I was wrong. The paywall generates many millions of dollars excess revenue due to the high fees paid by data scrapers who download it all on a regular basis.
Supposedly the new system will continue to bill data scrapers, but regular folks will get the service for free.
BTW, PACER is already free to you if you are involved in a case, or ask for less than 300 pages.
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Open Decisions (Score:3)
Reading through the posts here, some defend the costs imposed based on the need to fund the infrastructure to search, index, and maintain the Pacer system.
I'd argue that our taxes largely already fund this, as it is necessary for the government to have access to the information as well. I'd be interested in seeing documents about funding sources and costs.
Personally, I wouldn't necessarily need or want full access to all of the data, but any decision should be available to the public, (much as the Supreme
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Ten cents a page is basically the cost for paper and printer. That seems reasonable for paper copies, and the cost can be significant. This cost would now be shunted to all taxpayers, and promptly abused by those using the service.
For electronic copies (where you can eat your own printing costs) -- that's a different story, as the bandwidth is not significant against the government's everyday use and does not incur significant additional costs to the taxpayer.
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Fair enough, but there's no law in PACER.
PACER is for district courts, which don't create binding precedent. Appellate courts do that, and their decisions are published through other channels. Findlaw [findlaw.com] is a free resource covering all federal and many state courts. Also see the excellent Legal Information Institute [cornell.edu] for US statutes, regulations, and other sources of law.
PACER is filled with trial court decisions. Lots of exhibits of evidence submitted during trial. Lots of motions filed during litig
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I'm just saving my strength for the Doxxing orgy. I'm not as young as I used to be.
good (Score:4, Insightful)
This was all part of a decades-long right-wing push to "run government like a business" and I'm glad to see it going away (especially since I use PACER and those charges can add up quickly).
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I thought cost-recovery fees were a reasonable proposal, at least at one time. When servicing an information request caused government staff many hours of collating and duplicating documents, there was a good reason to encourage people making those requests to think twice about the volume of information they asked for. But a few things happened. One, with systems like PACER, there is no added labor or cost to the government to service requests; it's all done automatically on line without any employee's invo
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Systems like this are in place to prevent the cleansing light of day from ever scorching the guilty
It's law. If anything, the cleansing light of day would just cause the sausage to start spoiling before it cures.
"The M in MTV Shall No Longer Mean Music" (Score:2)
News for nerds. Stuff that matters.
Wait, is that even a thing here anymore? I can't see it anywhere.
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I mean. Archives are an interesting topic for a nerd and archival technology has evolved over time. From archival paper to digital strategies based on ISO standards used by the National Archives.
How would you preserve data for 100 years? 500 years? 1000 years? There are some serious technical problems with any median you choose.
Also, it's law stuff and that is a technical field on its own right.
Huzzah.
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They also need to do this for sci papers (Score:3)
The cost of storing and retrieving documents is dropped significantly over the years. We don't need to pay just to pull up a document, if we do then the fees should be minimal
This means..... (Score:2)
My legal fees get cheaper right? ........right?
Texas is following PACER Fees of 10 Cents (Score:2)
The Texas State Judiciary Committee is trying to follow the Federal PACER idea of 10-cents per page with a $6 a document maximum for their re:searchTX project. It's a huge money maker for the state courts and the lawyers who already make tons of money won't get too affected by it so it will only hurt the normal middle and lower class people who choose to represent themselves Pro Se but won't hurt the poorest of them all since they hardly every even know what to do anyway and they are allowed to get these f
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The Texas State Judiciary Committee is trying to follow the Federal PACER idea of 10-cents per page with a $6 a document maximum for their re:searchTX project. It's a huge money maker for the state courts and the lawyers who already make tons of money won't get too affected by it so it will only hurt the normal middle and lower class people who choose to represent themselves Pro Se but won't hurt the poorest of them all since they hardly every even know what to do anyway and they are allowed to get these fees waived.
You are confusing two different sides of the same coin. PACER has two components. One is for filing documents into a case, and one is for looking up case information. The two systems access the same information, but a random person cannot simply signon to PACER and file into a pleading. The $.10/page charge arises when people want to search cases in which they are not participants. Congress is considering changing the fee structure for the general public to access PACER documents, not for litigants filing i
The bill before congress, 6714 (Score:2)
Here is the actual bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/... [congress.gov]
It seems to be more about modernizing and consolidating PACER into a central system instead of the present fragmented one, getting the cases loaded in a timely fashion (5 days instead of the pressent over 90), and providing free access to the public.
My suspicions:
I don't know what they mean by "All documents on the system shall be available to the public and to parties before the court free of charge. "
Does that include all the data-scraper companies