Plug-in opens up federal courts, with your help

If you want to use the Internet to peek at documents filed in federal court cases, it's usually possible. It's just relatively expensive.

The U.S. Congress allows the federal courts to charge a fee--currently set at 8 cents a page--to search for and download documents. The database, called PACER, is strict about charging and even levies fees for searches that result in no matches.

Which is why a pair of Princeton University graduate students, with some help from Harvard University's Berkman Center, have developed a Firefox browser plug-in called RECAP (PACER spelled backward). It's designed to make more court documents available to the public at no cost.

The way it works is simple: when you log in to the federal court system and pay with a credit card to download a document, the RECAP plug-in automatically and transparently forwards a copy to the Internet Archive, where it becomes available for free to the next person who wants to read it. It's a collaborative effort, with others benefiting from your purchases, while you benefit from theirs.

"RECAP helps users exercise their rights under copyright law, which expressly places government works in the public domain. It also helps users advance the public good by contributing to an extensive and freely available archive of public court documents," Harlan Yu, a Princeton graduate student, said in a blog post, marking Friday's public beta release. The other collaborators are Tim Lee, Steve Schultze, and Ed Felten.

There are some potential problems. One is that because the RECAP developers plan to make the source code available, it wouldn't be hard for someone to seed the Internet Archive with "official court documents" that had been modified in some way. (The answer is for users to pay to download important files from PACER, or for the courts to employ digital signatures.)

Another is this: the more successful that RECAP becomes, the more revenue PACER loses, which means the federal courts might eventually attempt to ban the use of it. Then again, that hasn't happened yet; until it does, RECAP is a must-install feature for any court junkie.

RECAP is also available on Download.com.

[davidwarren]

while this would benefit a casual reader, any lawyer or reporter would still have to access pacer to pull the most current version, and to check the entire record. What would probably be more helpful for the practitioner would be a plugin that downloads the file automatically so you don't have to pay for the same file again if you look at it but forget to download. I am all for opening up PACER, but if you were to go to the clerks office, you can view the files for free. The 8 cents per page really is for the connivence of looking at them on your computer.

[jc364]

The federal courts definitely had this one coming; paying for searches with no results is just silly. I'm wondering why they charge per page; it's not like the courts are printing the requested documents with their own paper and toner. Maybe they charge for the bandwidth?

If the federal courts had been fair in their pricing in the first place (fixed rate per download, no charge for searching for documents), then I doubt that RECAP would have been created in the first place. So, it was the federal courts' greed that is now leading to their loss in revenue. Although, I'm sure the federal courts will figure out another way to get that revenue back.

Given that the court documents are clearly public domain, I don't see what legal reason the federal courts would have to ban the plug-in.

[Michichael]

They'd find one. Justice isn't a matter of right and wrong, legal or illegal. It's a matter of what side has the most money.

[jolyguy]

Interesting stance... but all these records are available for free by going to the courthouse which satisfies the public domain argument.

Now if your argument is "Why don't they make them available on the internet" then is another animal. The real question I have: "Why aren't they going after State and County courts?" Those records are much more valuable to the layperson.

[ddesy]

Of course the real solution is getting the government to stop charging for electronic access to public domain documents. That would actually make things more open, the way they should be.

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[fokkwp]

If PACER were a for-profit company, they would charge for every download and your contract would forbid you from sharing it with anyone else. DRM for court documents.

And, we would applaud the for-profit PACER for being all-American, free-market, and free from any Socialist leanings.

And, there would be no innovate developments like RECAP - or if they did, they would be in court over it for years..

And, we would just keep paying forever.