Federal Courts Making It More Expensive To Access Records, Even As They're Swimming In Cash | Techdirt

Connotea Imports 2012-07-31

Summary:

"The Federal Court's PACER system is really quite misguided. It's the system that the federal courts use to distribute judicial records (court filings, rulings, etc.), but rather than making that info available to the public, it's basically locked up behind a paywall, and it costs people 8 cents per page to download documents. Well, it did cost 8 cents per page. They've just announced that they're jacking up the fees to 10 cents per page, and that can add up pretty quickly when accessing a lot of court documents or some rather long filings or rulings. While Harlan Yu and Tim Lee helped create RECAP to free up court documents, and that has helped make some of this material more widely available, it's still limited. And, in fact, some courts have expressed concerns about RECAP and told lawyers not to use it. And even though the official policy of the US courts is that they're fine with RECAP, it appears not everyone in the court system agrees. EFF lawyer Michael Barclay recently alerted me to the fact that the PACER system for the Western District of NY has a warning on its query page about RECAP...."

Link:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110915/11303415963/federal-courts-making-it-more-expensive-to-access-records-even-as-theyre-swimming-cash.shtml

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) ยป Connotea Imports

Tags:

ru.no oa.new oa.psi oa.usa oa.negative oa.floss oa.law oa.pacer oa.data

Authors:

petersuber

Date tagged:

07/31/2012, 12:42

Date published:

09/16/2011, 14:34