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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).
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.
Thanks for the clarifying conversion.
One twenty-thousandth of a penny per page is an incredibly more complex fraction.
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The reality is we have a judicial system that is run by and for its participants. Life appointments have created an unaccountable judicial aristocracy that can alter the constitution to fit its interests by simply reinterpreting its meaning. Where else could someone seriously claim "person" includes corporations and not be laughed at. Without that verbal contortion, the courts would lack the power to protect corporation's "rights" separate from those of its owners. So they simply adopted a meaning for the word to fit their conclusion and give themselves the power to enforce it.
Congress approve the funds for the Judiciary. Collected fees generally go to the Treasury and are appropriated via the annual appropriations acts. Some fees go to fund specific activities (via permanent accounts) or to mandatory expenditures. If the Judiciary has large unobligated balances that they are using as a "slush" fund, then Congress should take action.
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.
If I have to have 2 IT people and a manager on staff to oversee the online services, that's about $300K/yr in salary and benefits.
If serving up documents online is essentially free once it's all set up, then the cost per page is zero. Plus the overhead of $300K/yr. Let's say it's not a very busy department and rarely gets requests, and it only served up 1,000,000 pages a year. That's 30 cents a page in costs understand the proposed scenario.
If those requesting the documents aren't paying what is effectively a type of use tax, then the costs would need to be covered by the general fund.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
There's the marginal cost of each additional request.
There's the cost of keeping it up and running, which is usually based on predicted demand. If you plan for staffing and computer capacity for N1 requests a day with a peak of N2 requests per second during periods of high demand, you'll be paying for a large chuck of that whether the demand is there or not.
There's the amortized capital cost of the initial investment. That's the cost of computers, one-time software license fees, one-time consulting fees, etc. that you pay before and during initial rollout.
Someone has to pay for this.
Do you have the taxpayer pay, or the user pay?
Back in the "paper and photocopier days" many courthouses charged a fee that supposedly covered the cost of photocopying and the cost of incremental labor to make the photocopy, but the taxpayers covered the cost of keeping the courthouse open to the public, which was not small.
In the modern era, it makes sense for the taxpayers to pay for the costs of keeping the system up and running up to a reasonable capacity, but to charge users an incremental cost, which is probably a fraction of a cent per page/per MB, plus a fraction of a cent per individual request.
On the other hand, at some point, the cost of charging greatly exceeds the fee for service. At that point, just say "forget it, the taxpayers will absorb the entire cost."
To prevent overtaxing the system, limit the speed at which data can be retrieved, but provide a for-fee bulk-data-access system for large law firms, data brokers, news outlets, and anyone else willing to fork over a fee to cover the costs of providing fast access to bulk data.
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I'm seeing many areas in which the U.S. government is badly or insufficientlly managed.
Yeah, well, who's fault is that?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
No, it's old CRT that used a single tube. An OLED uses a lot more tiny tubes.
that's still not very much. You don't hire an entire team for something like this. You host it on a third party service that hosts other publicly available sites and so your costs are mixed in with theirs. They're public documents so it's not like it needs a lot of extra work/security. You could have an Intern do the whole thing.
The only time you'd incur any serious cost for people is if you want to make a pork project out of it. I'm not opposed to that (it's what we do with our Military) but that's not really a cost, you're spending money to spend money.
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including laws and regulations are pay access only. That is why the government says ignorance of the law is no defense. Thus their butts are covered and they can club the peasants in to line.
;)
Mean while if your a politician or government bureaucrat you are rarely prosecuted even when you knew about the law or regulation. They leak, lie,use the power of government and their positions for personal reasons, personal profit, get elected/hired get rich! etc.
Our Government is badly broken and it has zero integrity in my book. And that includes the Congress, Judiciary, Law Enforcement (FBI, CIA, National Security, deep state losers). They are all out for themselves, their party and their ideology. They are the only ones qualified to rule.
Just my 2 cents
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
... reducing the price would allow poor(er) people access to public records.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
RECAP is a great chrome extension that allows you to download certain documents that have already been downloaded by another RECAP user. It's not fool proof, but has helped me save a few bucks.
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.
This right here is complete bullshit. It is not zero, not even close. There are servers, data centers, IT staff, hard drives, maintenance to maintain these servers, data centers. Air conditioning, building maintenance, building lease fees, electricity. Is any of this stuff free?
I think it's completely reasonable to charge to retrieve these documents when there is a entire not-free infrastructure that supports this ability to retrieve these documents online.
Don't like it? Drive to the court house you're interested in and request dead tree copies?
Why do we allow public records to be restricted in the first place?
I'm betting there are numerous agencies that would gladly distribute the information free of charge, if it was just legal for them to do so.
I used to pay 10 cents a page to make photocopies at Kinko's back in my college days.
It is still 10 cents per page (I just looked) So maybe the govt is thinking "hey it costs money to make a photocopy, looks like 10 cents is still the going rate" And each download is what... a copy right ?!
This case would have been a good item for groklaw. That was a very good site for topics like this. I miss it.
The lawsuit is excellent news. I recently had need to access specific federal court records but the cost of doing so deterred me. There's also an outrageous fee of $11 per document for certifying it as a "true copy" (similar to a notary public stamp). When you include grand jury testimony, witness depositions, courtroom dialog, evidentiary material etc., a federal case can easily run into thousands of pages...at ten cents per page and $11 per page for certification as true copies. These records should be free or made available for a low, flat fee per hundred pages, say 20 cents per hundred, and $11 should cover all of the pages.