PACER makes $150M/year charging Americans to read their own court records. Every bankruptcy court also publishes a free RSS feed with the same data.
Free PACER advocates say $2 billion estimate is out of touch
PACER makes $150M/year charging Americans to read their own court records. Every bankruptcy court also publishes a free RSS feed with the same data.
Free PACER advocates say $2 billion estimate is out of touch
17 Comments
Genuinely hilarious that shit like this is paid access in the U.S.
I will build it for only $1 billion ! ( i will use claude lol)
I’m curious. Does free also mean open access? Can anyone then access it, say via scraper to build tooling leveraging that data?
There’s a project called RECAP that allows you to download and share any file that you access to their archive, allowing anyone else who is using PACER to grab your archived version instead of paying for access. It’s really great: [https://free.law/recap/](https://free.law/recap/) but it’s insane that this is not the default.
Had court in a major city sometime ago. I couldn’t find free parking anywhere. Everywhere was paid parking provided by several companies.
Finally found the cheapest one and their posted price was different than what was on their website through which I had to pay. Still cheaper than the others.
What made me think was, these companies are getting rich off people who have to go to court. And since no one knows how long they’ll actually have to be there, I’m sure several opt in for a longer reservation. Fucking leeches these businesses.
My BIL is an attorney for the DOJ, environmental tort law, and when he needs to use PACER they even charge him for it. He’s got an issued credit card he uses but they still charge themselves to use their own system.
charging citizens $150 million a year to read their own court records is the most american thing I’ve ever heard. monetize the public good, then act surprised when nobody trusts the system.
You see, making public records accessible would require Congress to give a shit about ordinary people.
Aaron Swartz (one of Reddit’s founders) thought this should be free and released large volumes of files. This is really what started the government to get interested in putting the boot to him.
TBH I can’t imagine hitting the free PACER limits as an individual instead of for business purposes. I’d agree it should be truly free and open but individuals are not being charged to access their own records.
The craziest thing is there was a class action lawsuit on the ground that the fees were too high which the court system lost and agreed to settle by paying $125 million to cover overcharges between 2010 and 2016– but they did nothing at all to change the fees!!
https://www.pacerfeesclassaction.com/
Sometimes I just want to start a new class action lawsuit so they actually change the fees.
Title is inflammatory click bait. America has plenty of issues. No need to invent new rage bait.
Public records are freely accessible if you go where they are stored. The court clerk is right there. You can go any time.
If you want them digitized and searchable? Someone has to do that.
Since most people don’t need that service, those who do pay for it.
And it’s usually law firms or journalists who pay. Not average Americans. Who actually needs to be able to search court records in their entirety? Most people wouldn’t even understand what to make of a motion brief anyway.
And PACER is still actually free for low volume searches. Want to look up one notable ruling? That somehow isn’t already publicly linked somewhere or posted on the court website? You only get charged if you manage to rack up more than $30 in charges in any given ~~month~~ *quarter*. If your monthly bill is less than that, it’s waived. At 10 cents a page most casual users can use it for free.
I suppose we could all just pay extra taxes to make a service, that almost no one needs, free. And do nothing but cut the operating costs of big law firms. But that would be silly. And honestly more “American” than the current system.
RIP [Aaron Swartz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz?wprov=sfla1)
If you haven’t seen *[The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz](https://imdb.com/title/tt3268458/)* you really should.
I’ve been railing against PACER for years. It’s absurd.
The cost of public access to judicial records is a really important issue for transparency. Most of the money that the judiciary collects in PACER fees is actually paying for a related but distinct piece of software, which is the court’s electronic case filing system, used to administer all the work of the federal courts. They also use some of that revenue for courthouse tech.
The rate has been ten cents per page for 14 years. Look at cloud storage costs over that time period: they’re a tenth of what they were, or less. The organization I run provides docket information and filings for immigrant-detainee habeas corpus cases. Our PACER bill is going to be over $5000 *this quarter*.
A little light on this subject – This is all by law enacted by Congress. The Federal Judiciary budget is less than $10 billion/year, 1/10 of what the DoD spent down last September.
Digitization, storage, and retrieval of court documents across all federal courts is not an inconsequential cost.
PACER revenue can only be used to pay for PACER infrastructure and operations. It is meant to be self-sustaining.
$2 billion sounds like an Oracle quote, and that’s before cost overruns.