Firefox Plugin Liberates Paywalled Court Records

Posted by kdawson on Friday August 14, 2009 @01:01AM from the free-as-in-beer dept.

Timothy B. Lee writes "If you want to access federal court records, you're often forced to use PACER, a cumbersome, paywalled Web site run by the federal judiciary. My colleagues and I at Princeton's Center for IT Policy have released a new Firefox extension called RECAP that allows users to automatically upload the documents they download from PACER into a public archive hosted by the Internet Archive. It also saves users money by automatically notifying them if a document they're searching for is available for free from the public archive. Over time, we hope to build a comprehensive, free repository of federal court records that's available to everyone."

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How do I verify Authenticity? by localman57 · 2009-08-14 02:10 · Score: 5, Interesting

If the system relies on my uploading documents that I downloaded from the court, how does it authenticate the validity of those documents? Suppose I'm a patent troll lawyer. What's to keep me (aside from non-technical disciplinary stuff) from downloading documents that have unfavorable rulings to patet troll companies, then modifying them to make it look like the precident is different, and uploading them to RECAP? It seems like this could be a good way to derail the competition.