Government's PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says (bloomberglaw.com) 17
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg Law: The U.S. government charges too much for access to an electronic database of federal court records, the Federal Circuit ruled in a decision curbing a revenue stream the court system uses to help fund other programs. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a lower court's decision that the government was not authorized under federal law to spend $192 million in Public Access to Court Records system fees on court technology projects. The lower court "got it just right" when it limited the government's use of PACER revenues to the costs of operating the system, the court said in a precedential opinion Thursday.
"We agree with plaintiffs and amici that the First Amendment stakes here are high," the court said. But it said it doesn't foresee the lower court's interpretation "as resulting in a level of user fees that will significantly impede public access to courts." The ruling is a win for public access to court information, as PACER fees will go down if the ruling withstands a possible government appeal. But access still won't be free, despite calls for the government to stop charging for it. The Federal Circuit said it was up to Congress to decide whether to require free access. Challengers said PACER fees were too high, while the government said the middle ground reached by the lower court made the fees too low. Fees for downloading a copy of a filing run 10 cents per page, up to $3 per document. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts collected more than $145 million in fees in 2014 alone, according to the complaint in the case. Under a 2020 change to the fee waiver rules, about 75% of users pay nothing each quarter.
"We agree with plaintiffs and amici that the First Amendment stakes here are high," the court said. But it said it doesn't foresee the lower court's interpretation "as resulting in a level of user fees that will significantly impede public access to courts." The ruling is a win for public access to court information, as PACER fees will go down if the ruling withstands a possible government appeal. But access still won't be free, despite calls for the government to stop charging for it. The Federal Circuit said it was up to Congress to decide whether to require free access. Challengers said PACER fees were too high, while the government said the middle ground reached by the lower court made the fees too low. Fees for downloading a copy of a filing run 10 cents per page, up to $3 per document. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts collected more than $145 million in fees in 2014 alone, according to the complaint in the case. Under a 2020 change to the fee waiver rules, about 75% of users pay nothing each quarter.
All Public Records (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
UPS is really UP in fact it went up $10.00 a share in the last 2 days.
Stamps.com just reported Block Buster earnings
So Why? did the USPS completely missed the boat?
Oh Wait, it is a plodding mis managed, bloated bureaucracy hobbled by past bad contracts with the their unions.
Re: All Public Records (Score:4, Informative)
Nope, itâ(TM)s the law passed by congress requiring them to fund pensions fully for liabilities that are decades away. No other business, whether public or private, has this same restriction. It was self sabotage by Republicans.
Re: (Score:2)
The USPS should fully fund their pension obligations. Using the same rules applied to business.
In fact the most problematic pensions in the country are underfunded government employee pensions. If you make the promise you should fully fund that promise. And the government often does not.
Re: (Score:2)
The USPS should fully fund their pension obligations. Using the same rules applied to business.
No business was held to a standard anywhere near as strict as the USPS was in regards to pension funding.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes! very True, but that is what happens to puedo government run, propped up and poorly managed operations.
You don't get the perpetual taxpayer bailouts without the slimy congressional fingers in the pie.
They come as a package.
We are actually debating the same point kinda
But even were that fixed there would stil
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: All Public Records (Score:2)
On the other hand, their servers probably don't cost $145 million, but with the bloat of government you never know.
It's not the servers that are the issue. I don't know about these specific types of requests, but I've dealt with FOI requests before, and servers are a tiny percentage of the cost. The largest part is paying for the time spent tracking down all relevant information for the request, and then going through it and removing any information which cannot be shared with the public due to security/privacy concerns.
We could front-load those costs by just having a department which reviews all government correspond
Good news one step better (Score:3)
Do I Get a Refund? (Score:4, Interesting)
The system is filled with traps that rack up charges for documents and pages that you don't realize are useless until too late, after having paid to download them. Just like bitcoin mining, only more effective.
Should be Free* as In Beer (Cost Against Harvest) (Score:5, Informative)
I've dealt with the county, state, and state supreme court court system here in Texas and they are trying to follow the federal PACER system's fee schedule of $0.10 USD per page to monetize the court system and public records.
I've had to pay hundreds of dollars myself to retrieve my own court records that I submitted myself electronically as PDF files only to get the certified copies of the documents that could be used as further evidence in my case, at $1.00 per page for the certification.
After dealing with the three court systems here which luckily are bare-bones electronically enabled I found the whole process to be difficult for retrieval and submission, but with a little trial and error I was able to do everything from my computer without having to visit the clerk's offices personally for the majority of my case work, except to retrieve some documents on USB that were not allowed to be electronically transferred.
While I would argue that public access to public court records should be free* (as in beer), I will stipulate that there needs to be a low threshold bar set for document retrieval to avoid abuse of the system and massive harvesting of records by private entities who would use the data in the records to screw people over and blackmail them over their personal details.
I had to submit copies of documents with certain personal information and even after thoroughly redacting them to comply with the state and local rules to mandatory redaction of sensitive and personal information the data left over in those documents is still quite telling. You can build a perfect identity theft portfolio for anyone involved in the civil court system, and much more so for those who represent themselves Pro Se since they can't hide behind corporate attorneys and need to disclose all matter of personal information such as date of birth, e-mail address, full address, phone number, which is usually their home address and only means of contact for normal folks on every single submission to the court while attorneys are able to hide behind their law firm's information, addresses, phone numbers, etc.
Additionally, many lawyers and paralegals are from the older generation and their entire document workflow deals with paper documents scanned to image based PDFs without OCR (optical character recognition, which is not required but optional) and they have no idea about the Redaction features of PDF software nor are they willing to sift through thousands of pages of documents trying to redact every instance of a bank account number after the OCR mangles the number and won't hit a direct search-and-replace match.
I've found that a low monetary cost and payment with a little effort to access documents keeps a lot of bad folks and companies from pulling massive troves of legal documents that are scanned and filed by old lawyers. A little cost per-page and per document creates a minimal protection layer against mass harvesting and abuse.
One of the ways to avoid reverse spam is by charging a trivial amount per document and page so that a mass harvesting engine has to spend quite a lot to get so many pages of documents and the money can be traced to find out who paid for the access so the mass harvesters have a harder time hiding behind a login and an IP address.
Re: (Score:2)
I had to submit copies of documents with certain personal information and even after thoroughly redacting them to comply with the state and local rules to mandatory redaction of sensitive and personal information the data left over in those documents is still quite telling. You can build a perfect identity theft portfolio for anyone involved in the civil court system...
Or.... and stay with me here... the US could pass a law explicitly stating that if a bank or other corporation gets defrauded, they and only they suffer any consequences and the poor sod whose identity was used to defraud them is guaranteed made whole with no personal consequences, since they are quite literally an innocent bystander. You know. Like it fucking should have been from the very beginning. The current situation where people suffer who have no ability to defend their personal information beca