Slashdot Mirror
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.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
"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.
I'm guessing you've never actually used PACER. Nothing is self-explanatory. The interface is tiresome and unfriendly - mostly because of the need to hide results until the user agrees to pay (unless you're making a search in which case you're paying for the number of pages needed to display your results).
Remember, the electronic docket is needed by the parties to the case. They already paid filing fees for everything they submitted. If those fees don't cover the cost of an electronic docket, maybe they need to be increased. Most filings are electronic, so there's little need for human intervention like scanning and uploading.
I'm not going to dispute that there's a need to maintain servers and run a helpdesk. However, I'm not convinced that the $60 million/year revenue from PACER on top of the court filing fees is necessary to build a simple document search and retrieval site.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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