No Free PACER as US Lawmakers Exclude Proposal from Spending Bill

U.S. lawmakers have left a proposal to make the federal judiciary's PACER online court records system free out of a sprawling, $1.66 trillion spending measure unveiled on Tuesday, a setback for advocates as the current Congress nears its end. From a report: Supporters of the Open Courts Act had been pushing to get the stalled, bipartisan legislation attached to the omnibus spending measure, which boosts overall spending on the judiciary by nearly 6% to $8.461 billion in fiscal year 2023. Currently, users of PACER, which stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, are charged $0.10 per page to download documents up to a $3 cap, which does not cover transcripts. The Open Courts Act would make electronic court records freely available and mandate the judiciary to develop a new website to access them. It had already advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a bipartisan vote in December 2021.

Acronyms

[rossdee]

"which stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records"

Shouldn't that be PATCER

Re:Acronyms

[DarkRookie2]

Nah, the 't' is lower cased.

Wow, a $3 cap?

[93 Escort Wagon]

This will not stand...

Somehow I doubt you're gonna find much of anyone who cares. On the face of it, anyway, this sounds like some court harasser's boutique cause.

Re:Wow, a $3 cap?

[vux984]

Yes and no. The government really SHOULD create a modern website to distribute this stuff to the citizens for free.

The old system made sense when printed documents were involved.

The current system is like if comcast still charged you telegram pricing or USPS first class letter pricing to send an email. It's absurd even if its pretty cheap.

The only reason PACER hasn't been updated is literally because there is no competition pressure and it takes an act of congress to make a change.

Its the right thing to do.

Re:

[b0s0z0ku]

It should be distributed to citizens and other individuals. The fee may have its uses -- to discourage third-party background-check site skum from scraping the data and including people who weren't actually found guilty in their databases.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a lot of entities who care. $3 may not sound like much but there are a lot of companies who access this information across a lot of different fields and incur a massive cost from doing so. But what world does $0.10 per page make a lick of sense when it's all 100% electronic and you don't have some court clerk digging through records to scan something (like the old days)? It's long past time for the old "back when this was all paper we did it this way" days to go away.

Re:

[b0s0z0ku]

The fee may have its uses -- to discourage third-party background-check companies from scraping the data and including people who weren't actually found guilty in their databases. It you've merely been arrested (but not convicted), are a witness, etc -- it should be relatively private; not prejudice your chances at employment.

PACER

[baomike]

This might be a place to mention them. Only one person has to pay.

Re:PACER

[OverlordQ]

I think you mean RECAP [free.law]

Re:

[baomike]

you are correct, AM brain reversed it too many times.

Re:

[BenBoy]

It was genuinely gratifying to hear (here) about the RECAP service; it's the best case of "routing around the damage" I've seen in a while.

One of the few things that ought to be free

[alvinrod]

This is one of the few cases where I absolutely think that this is something the government should provide for "free" as our judicial system does not make it fully possible to know the law without being able to see how various courts have ruled on it and shaped it in practice.

Fortunately there's a very good technical solution to this that would make it rather inexpensive to implement. Just use torrents and let the people share it. Large law firms would want to keep a lot of the files on hand and universities and libraries could also serve as repositories for large amounts of the data. You'd get plenty of my sort who'd gladly maintain personal copies as well.

Perhaps after the rousing success we can do the same with all of the taxpayer funded research that's wound up in various journals or conference proceedings as well.

Re:

[beezzeeb]

That is a very good idea. I have been thinking about this just at a personal level, all of the power that is used to just back up my cluttered cloud life and all of its duplicate files across platforms. I’m guessing a large percentage of all of the data that gets created is like that, rarely used again, but retained and backed up for eternity. I wonder if anyone is working on a way to store some of that data in carbon?

Re:

[Martin Blank]

The Biden Administration issued an order a few months ago requiring that all papers and related data for research funded by the government must be made available online for free no later than Jan 1, 2026, with the papers and data going up simultaneously with the peer-reviewed manuscript. Agencies have until the end of 2024 to create their policies and the end of 2025 to implement them.

https://www.science.org/conten... [science.org]

Re:

[b0s0z0ku]

Do you want individual cases to be scraped by every background check company out there? Here's the problem: a case may appear in PACER and be scraped by a background check predator. Is there any requirement that the case by deleted from the predator's database if it doesn't result in a conviction or is sealed for other reasons? Do we want to jeopardize people's employment prospects because of an arrest without conviction or a lawsuit without merit? If it's to be free, there need to be safeguards, such a

Re: One of the few things that ought to be free

[jabuzz]

Because you can reliably connect the name "John Smith" in a court document to a random individual called "John Smith". Oh you can't so it would be a worthless exercise to scrape it.

Re: One of the few things that ought to be free

[b0s0z0ku]

Not all names are that common, plus court records can have DOB, residence, and a other info.

Quarterly minimum...

[steveb3210]

If you don't use more than $15 in a quarter, the fee is waived.

So if you just wanna look up one case or whatever, it's not a big deal.

But 10 cents a page is outrageous in 2022 for an online doc system.

Re:

[b0s0z0ku]

If a fee and a registration requirement precludes background check companies run by predatory scum slurping up entire court databases, that's a good thing. You don't want people who were arrested or suspected, but not actually convicted, to be included in background check databases. Nor do we want people like witnesses to be included.

not the free pacers

[diems]

oh no no more free mechanical pencils!!!

Ugly Car

[zenlessyank]

I doubt you could give away a Pacer to the hardest up person in need of a car. That thing was so ugly no one wants to even restore one.

10c protection

[bugs2squash]

is the fee the only thing stopping foreign powers, and big corps scraping the entire legal case history of the country and using it against us ?

Re:

[b0s0z0ku]

BINGO! Once the databases are slurped up by scum like private background check companies, "sealed" records would no longer be sealed ... they're under no obligation to delete them even if the case doesn't result in a conviction or even an indictment.

Everything Privitized is a Problem for Poor People

[BrendaEM]

I could not afford the $3000 transcript from my own tort trial.

Re:

[lowvisioncomputing]

Get the audio (and possible video) recording and run it through text-to-speech software.