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.
The state of Minnesota has handed Internet providers a 7-page blacklist (PDF) of gambling Web sites that they're supposed to prevent customers from accessing, a move that raises First Amendment and technical concerns.
"We are putting site operators and Minnesota online gamblers on notice and in advance," said John Willems, a Minnesota Department of Public Safety official, in a statement. Companies that received the list of off-limits Web sites--which was made public on Thursday--include AT&T, Comcast, Qwest, and Sprint/Nextel.
The Department of Public Safety's letters to the Internet providers say that "gambling is illegal within Minnesota" and claim that a federal law "requires upon notice by a law enforcement agency that you do not allow your systems to be used for the transmission of gambling information."
Federal law says that a "common carrier" must "discontinue or refuse, the leasing, furnishing, or maintaining" of any service if it's being used to transmit gambling-related information. (The U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal Communications Commission, however, have suggested that neither cable providers nor DSL providers are "common carriers.")
Joe Brennan of the Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association in Washington, D.C. said on Thursday evening that his group just found out about the blacklist and is consulting with First Amendment attorneys to evaluate its options.
Minnesota's move echoes what happened in Pennsylvania about six years ago. The Keystone State enacted a law permitting the state attorney general to deliver orders to Internet providers telling them to block possibly illegal Web sites.
But a federal judge in Philadelphia struck down the law in 2004 on First Amendment grounds, saying: "There is little evidence that the act has reduced the production of child pornography or the child sexual abuse associated with its creation. On the other hand, there is an abundance of evidence that implementation of the Act has resulted in massive suppression of speech protected by the First Amendment."
One reason the law failed to survive the court challenge was because of the way the modern Web is designed. Because many Web sites can share one Internet Protocol (IP) address, blocking the IP address makes the entire list of sites inaccessible. (An expert report prepared for the trial says that out of over 20 million .com, .net, and .org domains, over two-thirds of the sites shared an IP address with at least 50 other Web sites. In many cases, Web sites shared an IP address with thousands of other sites.)
Minnesota's efforts may suffer from the same overbreadth problem. Its blacklist includes GetMinted.com, a gambling site with an IP address listed of 194.36.21.124.
Sharing that IP address is another site called Cashcade--a domain devoted not to a virtual casino, but to a parent company's corporate site, with a product list and hyperlinks to a gambling news Web site that it owns.
Google's advice on sidestepping a South Korean law against anonymous YouTube video postings and comments doesn't seem to be sitting well with some of the country's authorities.
Google, citing free-speech concerns, on Monday said it will comply with the Korean law--but by prohibiting uploads and comments rather than by requiring people to verify their identities. And it told people they could work around the constraint by visiting another country's version of the video-sharing site.
Now the backlash is beginning to set in, according to one Korean media report.
"Korea Communications Commission network policy official Hwang Cheol-jeung says that the commission will be examining whether or not Google has engaged in illegal activities in any of the various services it operates in South Korea," the Hankyoreh reported Friday, saying that could include many more Google activities than just YouTube.
The report also said Google's Korean chief, Lee Won-jin, defended the move on Korean TV. And an editorial in the same publication sided with Google, describing the law's origins in government's effort to "suppress criticism on the Internet" and calling the KCC's actions "childish."
Google didn't respond to a request for comment.
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