Invective and Intrigue Within the Free Law Movement Over RECAP Changes - Robert Ambrogi's LawSites

"Disagreement over recent changes to a program designed to provide public access to federal court documents has developed into a feud of sorts between two advocates for free and open access to government information – and implicated in it is a cast of characters that includes the man who created the original version of Facebook, another man who may not actually exist, and a variety of people willing to weigh in with their opinions, but unwilling to do so on the record.

The feud involves RECAP, a program run by the Free Law Project (FLP) to collect documents downloaded from the federal judiciary’s fee-based PACER system and make them available for free in a publicly accessible archive. To collect PACER documents, RECAP encourages lawyers and legal researchers to use its extension for Chrome and Firefox browsers that automatically captures every document downloaded from PACER and delivers it to the RECAP archive...."