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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   18980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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Normally, whenever you download a document from the federal government's official PACER website, you must pay ten cents per page downloaded, capped at thirty pages (three dollars). If you have installed the RECAP extension in your browser, then the extension automatically uploads to the third-party website RECAP whatever you download from PACER. (You can create an account on PACER and download stuff from it even if you aren't a lawyer.)

Dang. Why doesn't someone (maybe the government itself??) just do that for every single public-but-paywalled document?

Ten cents per page is a reasonable fee for an archivist digging up and photocopying some documents, but it seems wildly out of touch with the costs of hosting a pdf.

Realistically there is a small but hopefully-growing set of folks advocating to strike the PACER paywall completely. Perhaps the pricing made sense when it involved paper copies, but no other federal branch of government demands fees for seeing the law these days.

I anticipate significant unintended consequences from such a decision.

no other federal branch of government demands fees for seeing the law

To be fair, documents submitted by parties to a lawsuit are not "the law". The judicial opinions that constitute "the law" are uploaded to the individual courts' websites plus GovInfo, not just to PACER.

A full understanding of the opinions requires seeing the exhibits and briefs that inform them.

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