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The Courts United States Your Rights Online Politics

Attacking a Pay Wall That Hides Public Court Filings (nytimes.com) 158

Posted by msmash from the know-your-rights dept.
The federal judiciary has built an imposing pay wall around its court filings, charging a preposterous 10 cents a page for electronic access to what are meant to be public records. A pending lawsuit could help tear that wall down. From a report: The costs of storing and transmitting data have plunged, approaching zero. By one estimate, the actual cost of retrieving court documents, including secure storage, is about one half of one ten-thousandth of a penny per page. But the federal judiciary charges a dime a page to use its service, called Pacer (for Public Access to Court Electronic Records). The National Veterans Legal Services Program and two other nonprofit groups filed a class action in 2016 seeking to recover what they said were systemic overcharges. "Excessive Pacer fees inhibit public understanding of the courts and thwart equal access to justice, erecting a financial barrier that many ordinary citizens are unable to clear," they wrote. The suit accuses the judicial system of using the fees it charges as a kind of slush fund, spending the money to buy flat-screen televisions for jurors, to finance a study of the Mississippi court system and to send notices in bankruptcy proceedings.
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Attacking a Pay Wall That Hides Public Court Filings More

Attacking a Pay Wall That Hides Public Court Filings

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  • Public works are bad for buisness (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Revek ( 133289 ) on Friday February 08, 2019 @09:11AM (#58088852)

    This country was built on public works and institutions. Unfortunately in the past 70 years or so we have moved steadily away from this and toward the notion that everything has to make a profit to be useful. To some there is no profit that does not equal monetary profit.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      We have become the ferengi

    • This country was built on public works and institutions. Unfortunately in the past 70 years or so we have moved steadily away from this and toward the notion that everything has to make a profit to be useful. To some there is no profit that does not equal monetary profit.

      Everything does have to be profitable to be useful. Being profitable means that the buyer finds something more useful than the seller, and conducts the purchase or trade. That determination is essential to improving the efficiency of you

      • No.

        There is the common good. Sometimes income covers the cost, as is our hope. You don't have to hate money to understand that shared resources have a cost. This is where perceptions and reality part company.

        The outsourcing of government services means inevitably that a private party makes profit from that outsources, and usually required service. Somehow, government must be incapable, or have those stupid civil service-- service for life rules. This is a fallacy.

        Public utility is another area that has now

      • Everything does have to be profitable to be useful.

        No, everything does not "have to be profitable to be useful". Frankly, that just ridiculous.

        Some things should never be run for a profit- like education, prisons, hospitals to name just a few.

        It's a sick world-view to think that everything has to be profitable to be useful. Is that how you view love or relationships?

  • humans too (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08, 2019 @09:13AM (#58088862)

    Maybe the hardware costs are a fraction of a penny per page, but there are also humans responsible for upkeeping the software and sites that these documents are retrieved from. That's not to say that 10 cents a page is not too much, but we shouldn't downplay the non-hardware costs of supporting these public documents. We're going to pay for it one way or another. Either the government funds it completely (indirect page fees via taxes) or partially (direct page fees via individual payments).

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Or a combination of the two -- resources that are completely free are vulnerable to abuse in ways that nominal fees often deter.

      Nominal being the key word. I agree that 10 cents a page for digital transmission isn't the amount where it should be at. It reminds one of e-book pricing where the naive people in charge said "just use the same cost as paper".

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        "resources that are completely free are vulnerable to abuse in ways that nominal fees often deter."

        yes we wouldn't want some malicious actor to be able to actually learn and understand the law. we wouldn't want some lawyer to start reducing their fee and introducing competition to the market because their cost went down. we wouldn't want someone to not take a plea bargain because their are innocent and have the resources to fight it in court. a nominal fees might help to prevent these abuses.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Those aren't the abuses. An abuse would be some company slurping up all the data, mining it and then turning around and filing 500,000 nuisance lawsuits or a patent troll using the system to abuse their position. I doubt lawyer fees are high strictly because of document retrieval fees.

    • Re:humans too (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08, 2019 @09:35AM (#58088976)

      Maybe the hardware costs are a fraction of a penny per page, but there are also humans responsible...

      Just how many times do I have to pay for stuff? My taxes paid to build it, and to pay the salaries of the people who work there. Now you want me to pay yet again to actually use it?

    • Help desk (Score:3, Insightful)

      by XXongo ( 3986865 )
      Yes, the statement "about one half of one ten-thousandth of a penny per page" is preposterous.

      Maintaining a server costs money; dealing with users costs money; maintaining a user INTERFACE costs money; and the help desk that answers questions like "how do I do this search and how do I get that document" costs money.

      And, in the real world, you ARE going to need somebody to answer questions like "how do I do this" and "that function doesn't work." Even if you think the interface is self-explanatory, you ar

      • I think the whole argument is overly simplistic. From what I can see the charge of $0.10 comes from the time when only paper copies existed. Even today, it is a reasonable charge for a paper copy. Today with the primary copies being electronic, the charge per page might be a bit high but what is the real cost?

        While it costs way less to make, store, and maintain PDFs, the cost is not zero. Servers and infrastructure do have a cost. From what I remember at an old job there was a 3rd party contract to scan go

      • Re:Help desk (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Albanach ( 527650 ) on Friday February 08, 2019 @10:16AM (#58089162) Homepage

        I'm guessing you've never actually used PACER. Nothing is self-explanatory. The interface is tiresome and unfriendly - mostly because of the need to hide results until the user agrees to pay (unless you're making a search in which case you're paying for the number of pages needed to display your results).

        Remember, the electronic docket is needed by the parties to the case. They already paid filing fees for everything they submitted. If those fees don't cover the cost of an electronic docket, maybe they need to be increased. Most filings are electronic, so there's little need for human intervention like scanning and uploading.

        I'm not going to dispute that there's a need to maintain servers and run a helpdesk. However, I'm not convinced that the $60 million/year revenue from PACER on top of the court filing fees is necessary to build a simple document search and retrieval site.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mysidia ( 191772 )

          However, I'm not convinced that the $60 million/year revenue from PACER on top of the court filing fees is necessary to build a simple document search and retrieval site.

          No.... $2 or $3 Million/Year should be ample to do that. They should just offer access on a subscription basis with a "number full documents/filing retrievals" allowance instead of per page --- And the subscription rate could depend on whether this is for personal use, education, Or non-profit use, Or if you are a legal profess

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ron_ivi ( 607351 )
        They already have to maintain a server, etc.

        All it needs is literally any web server OR ftp server OR gopher server, with a single folder with the documents.

        It doesn't require a "web 2.0" "webgl-enhanced" "lets-get-VC-funding-branding" "reactive layout" thing that costs money.

        Just 1 folder, with a bunch of files.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by XXongo ( 3986865 )

          I pray god to please save me from programmers who keep saying "it's really simple, it won't take any effort or cost any money."

          Yeah, sure.

          You've never been right about that before, but maybe this time.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            Actually, the GP is exactly right in this case. All you have to do is have some minimally organized structure of documents with some sort of basic linking to the home page, organized into one page per year (or month, or even week if it's a busy court system), with links containing the name of the case. Put that on a web server with adequate capacity, and submit it to various search engines to spider the contents. Google and other search engines will figure out the rest of the indexing, searching, etc. f

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Its not "preposterous". There are certainly web sites that cost more than that per hit, but I doubt this would be one of them. Moreover, this is a government agency. All the information on it actually belongs to the public. So people are being charged an additional fee to access information they paid taxes to create. More importantly, to use the courts they pay taxes to operate and that supposedly are there to serve them. This is just another example of the courts creating rules to limit access to legal sys

      • Maintaining a server costs money

        Not much. $10 per month is enough for an AWS instance. Storage for 10 million documents of 100kB each would cost another $5/month.

        the help desk that answers questions like "how do I do this search and how do I get that document" costs money.

        Then charge for support, not access. It would be like a tax on stupidity.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by XXongo ( 3986865 )
          The belief that only stupid people ever need help is a self-aggrandizing myth promulgated by idiot programmers who think that they're perfect and anybody who doesn't understand that is stupid.

          Turns out they're wrong.

          • The belief that only stupid people ever need help is a self-aggrandizing my

            I have worked at help desks, and done phone support. Not everyone needing support is stupid, but the vast majority are.

      • Who said the government had to host it? I don't have to go to a government site to look up the bill of rights. Its supposed to be publicly available information. Let archive.org or a similar group access and host it. I'm sure they would be happy to do so. If for whatever reason they don't want to then they only have to do the minimum necessary, just throw it all up on an FTP server somewhere. And I don't think they have to provide technical support. Its a free publicly available resource, beyond any access

    • The legal system already need to archive and have their own access to these records. Additional retrievals are the only costs to be passed on, which are near-zero.

      Either the government funds it completely (indirect page fees via taxes) or partially (direct page fees via individual payments).

      And because of the above, funding it completely via taxes is far more equitable. Page fees often hit people who are at a disadvantage.

      • ^^EXACTLY THIS^^ The data needs to be maintained whether anyone retrieves it or not, so the only charge should be what it costs to retrieve a document, so bandwidth and the middleware that interfaces the court system to the Internet. In the electronic age, an hourly/daily/monthly fee model makes much more sense than a per-page...For example, once search and retrieve functions have been developed, it does not cost more in development if they are used 5 times or 5 billion times. Storage is the same no matter
    • that's still not very much. You don't hire an entire team for something like this. You host it on a third party service that hosts other publicly available sites and so your costs are mixed in with theirs. They're public documents so it's not like it needs a lot of extra work/security. You could have an Intern do the whole thing.

      The only time you'd incur any serious cost for people is if you want to make a pork project out of it. I'm not opposed to that (it's what we do with our Military) but that's not

    • Yes, but FLAT SCREEN TVs. They are living a life of luxury while I am relegated to buying curved screen tv's or ones that can roll up. I wish I could get a flat screen TV. That has to be in the WIC aisle next to lobster, steak, and refrigerators.

      • I don’t understand what the complaint about flat screens is about. If you are buying a new TV these days, getting a CRT is difficult. Now if they paid tens of thousands per TV, that’s a legitimate complaint as a few hundred should be enough. I can only assume that courts replace their CRTs or finally got TVs and someone was outraged that they got flat screens because they personally can’t afford a new flat screen.

    • I used to pay 10 cents a page to make photocopies at Kinko's back in my college days.

      It is still 10 cents per page (I just looked) So maybe the govt is thinking "hey it costs money to make a photocopy, looks like 10 cents is still the going rate" And each download is what... a copy right ?!

  • Is this for the average NY Times reader? (Score:4, Funny)

    by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Friday February 08, 2019 @09:22AM (#58088902) Journal

    By one estimate, the actual cost of retrieving court documents, including secure storage, is about one half of one ten-thousandth of a penny per page.

    Thanks for the clarifying conversion.

    One twenty-thousandth of a penny per page is an incredibly more complex fraction.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Revek ( 133289 )

      Or just saying that its a penny to look at 20,000 pages. Don't make facts look simple or your article looks simple.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Or just saying that its a penny to look at 20,000 pages. Don't make facts look simple or your article looks simple.

        That is not a fact.

        They also could have claimed the service was estimated to be over charging by 200,000% but that number is so high it looks absurd.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hawk ( 1151 )

      I prefer a five-thousandth of a earthing, though.

      A ten-thousandth of a ha'penny is simply pretentious . . .

      hawk

  • Tyranny (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The reality is we have a judicial system that is run by and for its participants. Life appointments have created an unaccountable judicial aristocracy that can alter the constitution to fit its interests by simply reinterpreting its meaning. Where else could someone seriously claim "person" includes corporations and not be laughed at. Without that verbal contortion, the courts would lack the power to protect corporation's "rights" separate from those of its owners. So they simply adopted a meaning for the

  • Congress approve the funds for the Judiciary. Collected fees generally go to the Treasury and are appropriated via the annual appropriations acts. Some fees go to fund specific activities (via permanent accounts) or to mandatory expenditures. If the Judiciary has large unobligated balances that they are using as a "slush" fund, then Congress should take action.

  • Nothing at all to do with money (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pablo_max ( 626328 ) on Friday February 08, 2019 @09:39AM (#58088994)

    They don't care about the costs... at all.
    They do care about controlling access to information. Every authoritative government knows that the rule number 1 is to limit the knowledge and information your subjects can access. They should only have access to government approved messages.

    • The U.S. government needs FAR better management. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Friday February 08, 2019 @09:57AM (#58089056) Homepage
      "They do care about controlling access to information. Every [authoritarian] government..."

      I'm seeing many areas in which the U.S. government is badly or insufficientlly managed.

      • I'm seeing many areas in which the U.S. government is badly or insufficientlly managed.

        Yeah, well, who's fault is that?

    • They don't care about the costs... at all. They do care about controlling access to information. ... They should only have access to government approved messages.

      Complete fail. PACER does absolutely nothing of the sort.

      This service is built for lawyers, who can easily afford the charges (not because of personal wealth, but because the charges are passed on to clients). Moreover, information services retrieve the information in bulk and make it available to their users. PacerPro takes PACER data and

      • The groups complaining are nonprofit organizations that provide legal services so you are under selling the issue. It is a problem for the nonprofits providing legal services and the low income clients that are using those services.

  • Level of effort! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JeffSh ( 71237 )

    There should always be a barrier of effort or cost to some "public" documents. Our laws surrounding what's public and what's not were built during times when there was a level of effort in place to get such records; you had to go to the court house or the clerks office to get that information. This was an in built privacy fence that was ASSUMED while our society was deciding what should be public and what should be not.

    Cause it's not really fully PUBLIC, it's PUBLIC and put in some effort to get it.

    If we bu

    • Sorry, as long as we are subject to its jurisdiction, all aspects of the law must be universally accessible. This is one of the things we pay taxes for. We should get some service for our money.

  • If I have to have 2 IT people and a manager on staff to oversee the online services, that's about $300K/yr in salary and benefits.

    If serving up documents online is essentially free once it's all set up, then the cost per page is zero. Plus the overhead of $300K/yr. Let's say it's not a very busy department and rarely gets requests, and it only served up 1,000,000 pages a year. That's 30 cents a page in costs understand the proposed scenario.

    If those requesting the documents aren't paying what is effectively

  • Someone has to pay (Score:3)

    by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Friday February 08, 2019 @11:01AM (#58089400) Homepage Journal

    There's the marginal cost of each additional request.

    There's the cost of keeping it up and running, which is usually based on predicted demand. If you plan for staffing and computer capacity for N1 requests a day with a peak of N2 requests per second during periods of high demand, you'll be paying for a large chuck of that whether the demand is there or not.

    There's the amortized capital cost of the initial investment. That's the cost of computers, one-time software license fees, one-time consulting fees, etc. that you pay before and during initial rollout.

    Someone has to pay for this.

    Do you have the taxpayer pay, or the user pay?

    Back in the "paper and photocopier days" many courthouses charged a fee that supposedly covered the cost of photocopying and the cost of incremental labor to make the photocopy, but the taxpayers covered the cost of keeping the courthouse open to the public, which was not small.

    In the modern era, it makes sense for the taxpayers to pay for the costs of keeping the system up and running up to a reasonable capacity, but to charge users an incremental cost, which is probably a fraction of a cent per page/per MB, plus a fraction of a cent per individual request.

    On the other hand, at some point, the cost of charging greatly exceeds the fee for service. At that point, just say "forget it, the taxpayers will absorb the entire cost."

    To prevent overtaxing the system, limit the speed at which data can be retrieved, but provide a for-fee bulk-data-access system for large law firms, data brokers, news outlets, and anyone else willing to fork over a fee to cover the costs of providing fast access to bulk data.

  • including laws and regulations are pay access only. That is why the government says ignorance of the law is no defense. Thus their butts are covered and they can club the peasants in to line.
    Mean while if your a politician or government bureaucrat you are rarely prosecuted even when you knew about the law or regulation. They leak, lie,use the power of government and their positions for personal reasons, personal profit, get elected/hired get rich! etc.

    Our Government is badly broken and it has zero integr

  • Other agencies don't charge, why the courts? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by uncqual ( 836337 ) on Friday February 08, 2019 @12:17PM (#58089820)

    There are large databases maintained by many federal agencies/organizations. These include NOAA [noaa.gov], Census Bureau [census.gov] and NASA [data.gov]. Some provide FTP access, some provide an API, and some require going through a web interface -- and some provide all three. Some of these can easily result in downloads of many gigabytes, sometimes zipped up into one custom file for your request. Yet, not one that I've run across even requires registration, let alone paying anything.

    So, why would the courts charge for access to public data that is much more central to the proper functioning of a society?

    It's like the courts really haven't gotten beyond the notion of paper archives with costly human workers digging through dusty file cabinets to retrieve the data and copy it onto dead trees. That's a little scary since these are the same organizations that are our last resort for civil and criminal justice.

    • digging through dusty file cabinets to retrieve the data and copy it

      WHAAAT? YOU've seen those pictures of data centers on TV and movies, right? Those are just billions of pieces of paper -- ON A COMPUTER! And those places are drafty and noisy and sometimes even dark. And you want scribes to say in that tiresome environment, open cabinets, pull out drives and examine them? Each drive contain millions of pieces of paper, can you IMAGINE how heavy it is?

      And you want and expect them to do it for free, when they require sumo wrestlers just to move a single drive around,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sampas ( 256178 )
      It's not just one system. Every Federal Court gets to run its own PACER system and customize it. When people think of an independent judiciary, the think the courts are independent from the Executive Branch and Congress. They're also independent from each other. Every US District, Bankruptcy, Appeals and special Court gets to run its own PACER system. An appeals court can overturn a ruling but they can't tell a lower court which email system to use. It's not funded by any budget passed by Congress, includin
  • ... reducing the price would allow poor(er) people access to public records.

  • RECAP is a great chrome extension that allows you to download certain documents that have already been downloaded by another RECAP user. It's not fool proof, but has helped me save a few bucks.

  • The costs of storing and transmitting data have plunged, approaching zero. By one estimate, the actual cost of retrieving court documents, including secure storage, is about one half of one ten-thousandth of a penny per page.

    This right here is complete bullshit. It is not zero, not even close. There are servers, data centers, IT staff, hard drives, maintenance to maintain these servers, data centers. Air conditioning, building maintenance, building lease fees, electricity. Is any of this stuff free?

    I think it's completely reasonable to charge to retrieve these documents when there is a entire not-free infrastructure that supports this ability to retrieve these documents online.

    Don't like it? Drive to the court house you're

    • Just because it costs money to maintain doesn't mean it should charge users. The highways aren't cheap to maintain, but it doesn't mean they should all be toll roads.

  • Why do we allow public records to be restricted in the first place?

    I'm betting there are numerous agencies that would gladly distribute the information free of charge, if it was just legal for them to do so.

  • This case would have been a good item for groklaw. That was a very good site for topics like this. I miss it.
  • The lawsuit is excellent news. I recently had need to access specific federal court records but the cost of doing so deterred me. There's also an outrageous fee of $11 per document for certifying it as a "true copy" (similar to a notary public stamp). When you include grand jury testimony, witness depositions, courtroom dialog, evidentiary material etc., a federal case can easily run into thousands of pages...at ten cents per page and $11 per page for certification as true copies. These records should be f

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