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Attacking a Pay Wall That Hides Public Court Filings (nytimes.com)
The federal judiciary has built an imposing pay wall around its court filings, charging a preposterous 10 cents a page for electronic access to what are meant to be public records. A pending lawsuit could help tear that wall down. From a report: The costs of storing and transmitting data have plunged, approaching zero. By one estimate, the actual cost of retrieving court documents, including secure storage, is about one half of one ten-thousandth of a penny per page. But the federal judiciary charges a dime a page to use its service, called Pacer (for Public Access to Court Electronic Records). The National Veterans Legal Services Program and two other nonprofit groups filed a class action in 2016 seeking to recover what they said were systemic overcharges. "Excessive Pacer fees inhibit public understanding of the courts and thwart equal access to justice, erecting a financial barrier that many ordinary citizens are unable to clear," they wrote. The suit accuses the judicial system of using the fees it charges as a kind of slush fund, spending the money to buy flat-screen televisions for jurors, to finance a study of the Mississippi court system and to send notices in bankruptcy proceedings.
This country was built on public works and institutions. Unfortunately in the past 70 years or so we have moved steadily away from this and toward the notion that everything has to make a profit to be useful. To some there is no profit that does not equal monetary profit.
Maybe the hardware costs are a fraction of a penny per page, but there are also humans responsible for upkeeping the software and sites that these documents are retrieved from. That's not to say that 10 cents a page is not too much, but we shouldn't downplay the non-hardware costs of supporting these public documents. We're going to pay for it one way or another. Either the government funds it completely (indirect page fees via taxes) or partially (direct page fees via individual payments).
They don't care about the costs... at all.
They do care about controlling access to information. Every authoritative government knows that the rule number 1 is to limit the knowledge and information your subjects can access. They should only have access to government approved messages.
Maintaining a server costs money; dealing with users costs money; maintaining a user INTERFACE costs money; and the help desk that answers questions like "how do I do this search and how do I get that document" costs money.
And, in the real world, you ARE going to need somebody to answer questions like "how do I do this" and "that function doesn't work." Even if you think the interface is self-explanatory, you are going to need it. (In fact, ESPECIALLY if you think the interface is self-explanatory).
Really, ten cents a page might be a little high, but the number is going to be much closer to 10 cents per page than to the quoted ten cents per two hundred thousand pages.
"They do care about controlling access to information. Every [authoritarian] government..."
I'm seeing many areas in which the U.S. government is badly or insufficientlly managed.
There should always be a barrier of effort or cost to some "public" documents. Our laws surrounding what's public and what's not were built during times when there was a level of effort in place to get such records; you had to go to the court house or the clerks office to get that information. This was an in built privacy fence that was ASSUMED while our society was deciding what should be public and what should be not.
Cause it's not really fully PUBLIC, it's PUBLIC and put in some effort to get it.
If we build systems that lower the bar to retrieve information from certain repositories that before had a level of effort requirement to get information, we may accidentally cause huge problems.
do we want credit agencies to have unfettered access to all court records in the whole country? fuck no. what about facebook? i dont want that future. court records should always have a level of effort requirement. they arent just public documents.
There are large databases maintained by many federal agencies/organizations. These include NOAA, Census Bureau and NASA. Some provide FTP access, some provide an API, and some require going through a web interface -- and some provide all three. Some of these can easily result in downloads of many gigabytes, sometimes zipped up into one custom file for your request. Yet, not one that I've run across even requires registration, let alone paying anything.
So, why would the courts charge for access to public data that is much more central to the proper functioning of a society?
It's like the courts really haven't gotten beyond the notion of paper archives with costly human workers digging through dusty file cabinets to retrieve the data and copy it onto dead trees. That's a little scary since these are the same organizations that are our last resort for civil and criminal justice.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading