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Judiciary

Free Pacer Sites Shut Down After Mass Download by Open Records Advocate

Posted Feb 13, 2009 9:53 AM CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss

A trial of free Pacer service at 17 public libraries shut down last fall after public records advocates downloaded an estimated 20 percent of the entire database.

At the time, an official from the Government Printing Office told librarians that Pacer security had been compromised and the FBI was conducting an investigation, the New York Times reports. A government notice said the program was suspended “pending an evaluation.”

Aaron Swartz, a 22-year-old Stanford dropout, did the mass download from Pacer at the behest of open records advocate Carl Malamud, who wants to make the court documents available for free on the Internet, the story says. Last year, Malamud used $600,000 in contributions to buy and post 50 years of federal appellate papers. Now he wants to post lower court records.

Pacer charges 8 cents a page for court documents and uses the fees help pay for court technology. The New York Times cites recent court reports putting the surplus funds generated at about $150 million.

“Pacer is just so awful,” said Malamud, founder of PublicResource.org. He told the Times the system separates the people from the “operating system for democracy.”

Malamud says he would like to serve in the Obama administration, perhaps even as head of the Government Printing Office. The suggestion prompted laughter from John Podesta, head of Barack Obama’s transition team, the story reports. “He would certainly shake things up,” Podesta told the Times.

Comments

1.

Michael
Feb 13, 2009 11:23 AM CST

I don’t understand why Google hasn’t just indexed all the law on their own by now.  It would be less work than indexing all the library books, without the copyright infringement issues.  Then they could serve ads for clients by the type of law and state they were searching.  For example, if a client were searching for cases about custody modifications family law attorney’s close by could advertise their services.  PACER is a little different, in that they’re federal filings of everything: it’s hard to imagine why the minutia of, say, somebody’s bankruptcy filing needs to indexed.  Still, the issue seems like one best address by legislative rather than technological changes.

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2.

jose
Feb 13, 2009 12:18 PM CST

Why is he posting for free?  Why not be one of these guys who takes contracts off the SEC’s website and then sells them to people looking for forms?

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3.

Peter L. Wanger
Feb 13, 2009 5:06 PM CST

All papers filed in federal courts by the parties and all orders and judgments of every level of federal courts should be available online for free. Protective orders are available to keep confidential and other sensitive material blocked by redaction. PACER is an affront to democracy. The Congress and the Presidential budget should contain enough of an appropriation to make the workings of the Federal Courts familiar to the citizens of this country.

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4.

OSS
Feb 14, 2009 11:01 AM CST

A big thumbs up for Carl Malamud!

Open access is under attack, copyright law is a tool for some bad stuff coming.  Read up on the NIH.

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5.

MSL
Feb 14, 2009 12:16 PM CST

Michael and OSS - I don’t see how this story involves copyright at all.  As the NYT article states, “government-produced documents are not covered by copyright.”  The first issue is that the government wants to be able to charge for access (not unheard of, after all, agencies, etc. are explicitly permitted to charge for FOIA requests!) and users want to be able to get it for free.  The second, more important, issue would seem to be whether the government should be able to collect a surplus on these documents…

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6.

Julia
Feb 25, 2009 5:00 AM CST

Hurrah for Malamud and Podesta, ALL court records not of a confidential nature for good reason should be freely available to all in a true Democracy. Why should Podesta laugh, didn’t we elect Obama PRECISELY to “shake things up”.  A further indication that the Obama administration is already developing, and never meant to do otherwise, a very firmly “business as usual” stance in government, with disdain for the people.

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7.

Julia
Feb 25, 2009 5:02 AM CST

CORRECTION: Hurrah for Malamud and Swartz is what I had meant to write.

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8.

gea
Feb 25, 2009 6:29 AM CST

Well, no one works for free. Pacer should charge a fee, but they should not have a surplus, therefore they should lower their fees or provide free abstracts to the public. Also, it pisses me off, that those libraries lost out on their free pacer access.

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9.

Fedworld
Feb 25, 2009 7:04 AM CST

MSL—How might this involve copyright?  As you and the NYT noted, government-produced documents are not covered by copyright.  But PACER holds much more than that.  PACER holds all briefs, motions, etc., many (most?) of which are not drafted by the government.

As for Mr. Wanger’s assertion that PACER is an affront to democracy, surely that’s a bit strong?  Organizations of all types have long charged for copies, and the amounts have always been in excess of the variable costs associated with making a photocopy.  Seems to me that PACER is a big step forward in access, compared to the way things were when I started practicing law.  (Which, contrary to popular belief, occured AFTER the Pleistocine Era.)

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10.

Garp
Feb 25, 2009 8:01 AM CST

So, Julia, you think that for Obama to be responsive to the people, he needs to put Malamud in charge of the Government Printing Office? Interesting standards you have for vetting government officials ...

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11.

docswiz
Feb 25, 2009 8:46 AM CST

So Malamud thinks every court filing should be searchable on Google?  Would you like to see your client’s bankruptcy schedules pop up in a Google search, with all of their credit card account numbers?  Maybe a clever computer wizard could come up with a meta-search engine that could search through the millions of court records to pull out all of that personal data, including the social security numbers that should have been redacted but weren’t.

The PACER library trial tried to strike a balance between access and privacy.  Mr. Malamud shut down that trial and that is a shame.

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12.

accessforall
Feb 25, 2009 8:54 AM CST

At least Pacer is only 8 cents. Recorders and Registers of Deeda across the country are charging exhorbitant amounts for access to and copies of what laughinlgy are referred to as “Public Records”. And claimiing they have the COPYRIGHT to the content of what they only have the obligation to collect and make available to the public. No one minds paying the actual cost of copies, but having limited or no access to the content is holding them for ransom.

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13.

An actual records researcher.
Feb 25, 2009 10:55 AM CST

So let me get this straight. Malamud downloads a bunch of stuff that’s already free or close to it, and runs a non-profit soliciting donations so he can put this quickly out-of-date stuff on his site? What a jerk.

PACER is the federal system for accessing court records nation-wide, and $.08 a page is cheaper than going to the courthouse and plunking a quarter in a copy machine. As soon as the document is filed, it’s on PACER. It’s as close to real-time as it gets on the internet with a government filing. Also, now, by sending some young dope to go do this little errand, he shut down TRUE free public access for those who would be pressed to come up with the fee. Again, what a jerk!

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14.

JS
Feb 25, 2009 11:04 AM CST

This is ridiculous.  The information is freely accessible.  Any member of the public can go to a federal court house and view the file. They just cannot obtain a copy—digital or paper—without paying for it.  In a time when our court system is over-burdened and faced with budget cuts, after expending at least hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars on upgraded computer equipment to handle electronic filing and PACER, the least they should be able to do is make a tiny amount of money (compared to the overall budget) that might help offset the other budget deficits.  It’s only 8 cents per page!

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15.

R
Feb 25, 2009 12:29 PM CST

I’m sure Malamud is in line for a plum Obama Administration appointment: right behind Rod Blagojevich.

I don’t care if Malamud wants to spend hundreds of thousands of his own dollars download a bunch of PACER files - hey, it’s a free country - but why does he have to hog bandwidth and terminal time at PUBLIC LIBRARIES to do so?

In my opinion, Malamud and his minions using public library computers for this self-gratifying project are just one step up from the (also self-gratifying) library computer porn-site surfers.

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16.

HumourMonitor
Feb 25, 2009 4:00 PM CST

“R” and “An actual records researcher”— you have pegged it precisely.  A reasonable (dirt cheap, actually) cost to view certain docs—and court orders are free on Pacer—and this bozo and his psychophants (pun intended) want to deal in self-aggrandizing, self-promotion in the name of “democracy.”  Well, for starters, this ain’t no democracy.  Sorry, bozo, it ain’t.  Second, the desire for free access is really a petulant and childish insistence that everyone else (taxpayers) pay for your diddling thru the stuff—stuff you can go look at in the courhouse completely for free.  Taxpayers already pay enough.  And, as to the “surplus,” keep generating a surplus then use it to expand the services and speed when new hardware and software is needed.  Pacer is a pretty doggone good system on the federal level and beats nearly all state and local access I have seen—price and useability.

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17.

bg
Feb 25, 2009 8:24 PM CST

What use does the general public really have with all the fun and exciting documents we generate daily in litigation?!?!  The pro se crazies already know how to get ahold of these kinds of things, use form books, and just plain make it up from scratch!  They don’t need some other crazy putting every notice of appearance, docket correction, scheduling order, and letter by counsel whining to the magistrate about this or that on the interent for free.  And if I have to, I will start placing a copyright notice on every affidavit, memo of law, and, just for good measure, notice of motion and letter I write.  The judge will have permission to copy my papers, but anyone else is going to have to pay me a licensing fee.  Hmmm, maybe I’m on to something here.  I could then demand a licensing fee demand of Westlaw for publishing my appellate briefs . . . .

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