'Free PACER' Bill Advances Through Senate Judiciary Unanimously (fixthecourt.com) 31
The Senate Judiciary Committee today by voice vote advanced the Open Courts Act (S. 2614), a bill that would modernize the federal judiciary's case management system and -- finally -- make access to court filings free for all Americans. From a report: The bill was initially slated for discussion in committee last week, yet Chairman Durbin opted to postpone it for a week to allow for a handful of changes. Though advocates are cheering some and are not so keen on others, none of the amendments substantially alters the bill's impact or implementation, so strong support of the bill from Fix the Court, and, we believe, other leading nonprofit legal groups, remains. "There's no reason the American public should pay for public documents. The current cost to view or download a filing, ten cents per page, might not seem like a lot, but it quickly adds up and has been a barrier to access to justice for too long," FTC's Gabe Roth said. "The Open Courts Act fixes that, makes PACER free and modernizes the entire case management and filing system in a way that can make the judiciary's software a crown jewel and not an embarrassment."
Who. (Score:1)
Who gets to build it? How much was the accepted cost? When will it be done? How many years past that date do we think it'll be before its actually done?
These systems are too big to fail, so they seem to always turn into money soaks by the selected party. :( Call me jaded.
Re:Who. (Score:4, Informative)
PACER already exists. To use it, one must register, and it charges one's account for each downloaded page -- something like 10 cents a page, which is maybe reasonable for a paper copy but is pretty unreasonable for an electronic one. Then, once a calendar quarter, it forgives balances that are small enough (up to $30), and charges anyone with a larger balance.
Re: (Score:1)
Oh, this isn't a big overhaul? Nice. No wonder there wasn't a ton of fighting over who gets to build it...
Good ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Good ... (Score:2)
With that rule, rich people and corporations become immune from lawsuits since it's too risky because they hire expensive lawyers.
Re: (Score:2)
With that rule, rich people and corporations become immune from lawsuits since it's too risky because they hire expensive lawyers.
The English rule is followed by nearly every Western democracy other than the United States, I can assure you that rich people and corporations in those places get their pants sued off quite regularly.
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Have to agree with As_I_Please, being potentially on the hook for ridiculously huge sums in lawyers fees is a major disincentive to filing at all unless you know your case is ironclad. Or can judges waive the "English rule" there, in which case it is their decision either way.?
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Even in the UK costs are not automatically awarded, its up to the judge.
See the famous McLibel case, where McDonalds won against a group of individuals, but was left paying for pretty much all of both sides costs.
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Even in the UK costs are not automatically awarded, its up to the judge.
See the famous McLibel case, where McDonalds won against a group of individuals, but was left paying for pretty much all of both sides costs.
Sure but the whole reason the US justice system is used as a tool of blackmail is that you pay for your own defence even if you win. If some really wealthy person sues you have two options. You can back down and give them what they want, even if you would win a law suit, because you can't afford the court case or you can defend yourself to the tune of possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars in which case you'll be financially ruined. Either way in the US system it's a win-win situation for the party filin
Re: (Score:2)
The English rule is followed by nearly every Western democracy other than the United States
Yeah, that doesnt sound right. Cite a source.
Re: (Score:2)
The English rule is followed by nearly every Western democracy other than the United States
Yeah, that doesnt sound right. Cite a source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I wonder how exactly valid that one statement at the end is as the citations are impossible to derive any useful information from without spending an unreasonable amount of time. Particularly given the other response to your post mentioning that the English Rule is only an optional part of the Canadian system. I would suspect it's much the same for most of the countries that fall under that umbrella statement.
Loser pays (Score:3)
>I see no reason why the American public should be stuck with the bill for defending themselves against bullies who use the legal system as a weapon
Your proposal would cause exactly that to happen. Vicious rich people or depraved organizations (pick your favorite examples) could destroy anybody filing SLAPP suits, running up big law firm bills, and crushing the average citizen with them.
There's already a set of rules in place to award attorney's fees if an action really is frivolous. There's a huge gap
Not Good. (Score:1)
Unfortunately none of these senate voters actually understand how expensive it is to run the systems and keep them up and running, and to store all these court case documents literally with a retention period of "forever".
Re: Not Good. (Score:3)
Good thing there's a big system in place to collect tiny pieces of money from everybody collectively to fund it, called taxes.
Re:Not Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ten cents a page (Score:4, Informative)
Court opinions can run to great lengths and a lot of defendants are poor.
I'll drop in another issue, from experience trying to use the system. I'm stuck with the few free documents allowance because their verification system refused my credit card and they flatly, snidely, refused to look into it.
Re: (Score:1)
That is raw text, like ASCII characters. Not formatted legal documents in PDF form.
Re: Not Good. (Score:2)
Weak response:
A formatted pdf full of text is only about 100kb, so you're still looking at millions of docs per drive.
Even if they are just image scans, you are still looking at a meg or two per page. Storage at scale is still a trivial cost.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe we need a Bureau of Public Documents with the sole mission of making public documents available to the public. Right now we have many documents that must be public all throughout the federal government. If making them public consisted of sending them to this new Bureau, then we wouldn't need separate systems in each agency dedicated for this purpose.
Of course, this being America, this would end up being outsourced to Microsoft, and the only way to search it would be to use Bing, but the documents wo
Re:Not Good. (Score:4, Informative)
data.gov was more or less kind of intended to be what you describe. Also, good luck with that! My county recorder's office has a "public records" web search that turns up puny amounts of data online (if I show up in person, I can view the records directly) but has no simple method to retrieve all of the puny data available online at one time (e.g. CSVs inside a nice ZIP file produced nightly). They are the most unresponsive and closed-minded entity despite having barely useful data that is supposed to be both public and easily accessible.
On the flip side, my county assessor's office has their entire database available online to download in reasonably well-formatted files that are updated nightly. And the assessor's office data is literally everything that they have or really, really close to it. Their folks are also nice and friendly. It's a night and day difference.
So even if there were a central bureau like what you describe, some entities would publish their data as directed and be totally fine with that. Others would have to be drug along kicking and screaming the whole way like the little adult children that they are.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
It isn't that expensive, and the courts need to have these documents available anyway. Right now Pacer charges 10 cents a page for search results! This isn't the 80s, and I'm glad the Senate is actually doing something about it.
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting question -- I wonder whether the revenue from PACER charges covers the cost of bookkeeping, compliance, and hiring staffers to be rude to people asking why a credit card that works everywhere else in the world is being declined.
Running in without collecting and tracking money would reduce expenses.
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt the Judiciary branch is self-funding on this or any other front. But I bet this seemed like a great idea when the original law was passed: Westlaw and Lexis were charging per search HIT (I have heard), so funding Pacer by charging the lawyers who use it (and generally bill through to the client) would have been in line with industry norms and the "third way" zeitgeist.
Right now they waive the balance if you owe less than $15 at the end of a fiscal quarter--so the really low charges are not worth pur
Free who? (Score:2)
Free PACER
Ha, made me think of the South Park episode, Free Hat [wikipedia.org] (s9e6):
At a movie theater, Kyle, Stan, Cartman and Tweek express contempt at Steven Spielberg and George Lucas altering their films prior to their reissue to "make them more PC". They decide to form an organization to promote their cause. As an incentive, Cartman writes "free hat" on the sign and has Tweek fold paper hats to offer the attendees. Tweek is unable to make enough hats and the boys are surprised by the large turnout at the organization's first meeting. However, the attendees misconstrue the incentive and believe that the club supports the release of Hat McCullough, who was convicted of murdering twenty-three infants.
Oh heck yeah! (Score:4, Informative)
Other than the U.S. Copyright submission website which uses HTML 4 frames, PACER is the next most antiquated system I've ever seen and 10 cents per document is ridiculously expensive. The most common entity to eat the cost of accessing PACER outside of law firms are media outlets.
For those who don't know, PACER is where all legal actions in the U.S. federal court system get filed. A single case can have hundreds of actions with each action consisting of anywhere from a few pages to an 800 page tome. The entire system is a disaster from a technological and software development perspective because every single court has their own little nuances in the way they want to do things and the PACER system accommodates them rather than saying, "No, this is the way you will do it. Period." As a result, it's convoluted to navigate and makes you wonder how the justice system can even function. The horrible design of PACER is probably 49% of the reason why people complain about the broken justice system in the U.S. because filing is just as painful as trying to get anything out of it.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe the antiquity and the price are related. Do you know how much working components for a 486 cost on eBay?
Haha. (Score:2)
Expect it to cost $30B to implement, and then fail miserably like the FBI's failed system, and the Obamacare system.