[HN Gopher] "Free PACER" bill advances through Senate judiciary ...
___________________________________________________________________
"Free PACER" bill advances through Senate judiciary unanimously
Author : walterbell
Score : 341 points
Date : 2021-12-09 16:56 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fixthecourt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fixthecourt.com)
| inoffensivename wrote:
| PACER is a wonderful tool, but the current website is Byzantine.
| I'm very happy that it's getting some much-needed attention.
| Shicholas wrote:
| how is PACER wonderful? charging exorbitant fees to access the
| laws that govern me is a complete racket.
| [deleted]
| inoffensivename wrote:
| Well, the fees aren't wonderful, but the information you can
| get out of it is excellent. I grew up in not-America, where
| access to court records is even more difficult and expensive
| (e.g. have to have a lawyer do it for you).
|
| I didn't know that Free PACER was a thing, but I'm happy that
| it is!
| sgent wrote:
| It is, and its 100% funded by the fees they charge attorney's
| and others to access the documents. The amount of fees and use
| of them is somewhat ridiculous currently, but if they remove
| the fees without setting up an ongoing funding source I'm
| afraid it will stagnate like many state court systems.
| busymom0 wrote:
| As someone who's gotten into reading law related stuff, this is
| amazing news.
| romanzubenko wrote:
| This is great news. I had to implement PACER integration back in
| my days at Gusto for compliance and the pricing among many other
| things was very annoying to work with. The pricing is based on
| "number of pages" returned, which means that when you submit a
| query you don't know exactly how it will cost you ahead of time.
| ianhawes wrote:
| That's the best part of PACER!
|
| The other exciting thing is the threatening letter you get from
| the government when they can't charge your expired credit card
| for $9 and threaten to withhold that amount from your tax
| return if you don't pay the balance.
| romanzubenko wrote:
| The best part was for us was that after wrangling with their
| native API, we decided to go with one of the private
| companies that provide sane API wrapper on top of PACER. It's
| kinda crazy that there is a small industry of companies who
| make government api better. You can see some of these
| services by googling "bankruptcy monitoring".
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Same for public sector procurement (Request for
| Qualification/Proposal) portals. All the portals are
| annoying because there are 50 of them, and each of the
| portal have their way of navigation and filters. So, it
| become PITA to remember every portal tendency. There is a
| private website that offer a meta indexer service (with
| filters) that scrapped every single bit of procurement
| portal contents as for a fee monthly. I forgot the name of
| the site in the top of my head. It is worth the paid
| service for procurement.
| [deleted]
| the_optimist wrote:
| PACER explored new boundaries in regulatory capture "from the
| inside." It is now all too obvious a trend to have taxpayers fund
| and mandate the development of an institution, then subsequently
| build a sinecure upon its rental to those same taxpayers. This
| kind of triple-dipping is grotesque, and never should have been
| allowed in the first place.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Hats off to the Free Law Project for championing this. Success is
| possible.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158
| AlbertCory wrote:
| For reference: [1] shows the currently-free RECAP ("PACER"
| spelled backwards) listing for the Elizabeth Holmes / Theranos
| trial.
|
| The way this works is: you install a Chrome extension which
| automatically uploads anything you get from PACER into a free
| archive.
|
| How are they funded? I expect they're a 501(c)(3). So it's not a
| question of whether PACER can be free; it already is, partially.
|
| As for patents: Google used to host all the patent files for
| free, and then someone complained that that gave them an unfair
| advantage (note: but what???), so now someone else hosts them for
| free.
|
| So I don't think finding the funding is really much of an issue
| nowadays.
|
| [1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7185174/united-
| states-v...
| kragen wrote:
| The unfair advantage, I suspect, may have been that Google
| could look to see which patents were popular, or which ones
| were popular at a particular company, or which ones were
| becoming popular at a particular university. They already have
| that unfair advantage when it comes to search traffic, but
| reading a patent can expose you to treble damages for willful
| infringement.
| smg wrote:
| Does this mean that all the documents (emails from tech
| executives) that are part of the evidence for a court case will
| be publicly available?
| kingcharles wrote:
| They are already publicly available. You can access up to,
| IIRC, $30 worth of PACER for free each month. I know my access
| usually comes under the free boundary.
|
| But as poster below mentions, it depends on how the documents
| exist. There are two types of documents in a court case: common
| law record and discovery.
|
| Discovery = evidence kept by both sides, but not held by the
| court. This includes written documents, audio/video recordings,
| but also the transcripts of any depositions that have been
| taken of important people in the law suit. (A deposition is
| where you sit down with a person and question them under oath
| outside of the court room)
|
| Common law record = anything that is said in court, or filed in
| court.
|
| Most discovery never makes it into a court room. It is just
| shuffled back and forth between the plaintiff and defendant.
|
| Now, when it comes time to file a motion (let's say one of the
| parties tries to get the case dismissed) then it will usually
| be necessary to attach some documents as exhibits to the motion
| to clarify the point you are making to the judge. At that
| point, those documents will make it into the public record and
| will be in PACER.
|
| Even if something isn't filed in court, if the court case is
| USA v. TechBro, for instance, then as the USA is a governmental
| entity it is subject to FOIA and you can often get a copy of
| all the discovery that way. I often use FOIA just to avoid
| PACER fees.
| pwned1 wrote:
| No, generally evidence is not filed as part of a docket. PACER
| only includes court filings such as the complaint, answer,
| motions, orders, etc.
| granzymes wrote:
| And quotations from evidence produced during discovery are
| often redacted from those filings.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Giving the article contenteditable=true is certainly...a choice,
| especially because that makes the links unclickable.
| smegsicle wrote:
| Ha! a mockup mode they forgot to turn off, right? it doesn't
| seem to be on other pages.
|
| Note that links are still right-clickable, took me a second to
| try that.
| blendergeek wrote:
| It looks fixed now.
| gibolt wrote:
| Probably done by the editor, and forgot to disable it when
| shipping to prod -\\_(tsu)_/-
| kevinsundar wrote:
| > The CBO's cost Dec. 2020 estimate to build the new system was
| in the mid-two-digit millions, though given the fees that the AO
| is collecting from power users and agencies, the appropriation
| would more likely need to be in the single-digit millions, at
| most.
|
| What? Double digit millions for a CRUD app for public
| information?
| nojito wrote:
| Because the scale of PACER is absolutely insane.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> Because the scale of PACER is absolutely insane. _
|
| ...is it, though? It 's fucking 2021. Interns play with
| petabytes. Literally.
|
| CRUD on massive datasets is not a hard problem anymore. Or,
| at least, isn't eight digits and 10 years hard.
| recursive wrote:
| > Interns play with petabytes. Literally.
|
| Most interns don't. Most industry veterans don't either.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Most interns and industry veterans don't write wordpress
| plugins either ;-)
|
| The point is that you can learn enough of the basics to
| do useful things in 3 months with minimal prior
| experience.
|
| Working with petabytes of data isn't a "hard" problem
| like it was 10 years ago. IDK how large PACER is, and I'm
| not suggesting that an intern could implement a new
| system, but $x0,000,000 and a decade of lead time is at
| least an order of magnitude off.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| This sounds awesome! Now here's hoping they might do the same for
| the tax system someday. If only Intuit could stop lobbying to
| keep it a horrible train wreck.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Call your representatives. Share your concerns. In volume, it
| moves the needle.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Has the tax system ever become less of a trainwreck? I'm not
| an expert, but the trainwreckedness seems to monotonically
| increase. On multiple occasions in the past, significant
| numbers of voters have contacted their representatives to
| discuss just this topic. Why didn't voicing their concerns
| work on those occasions, and why will it be different this
| time around?
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Yeah, Reagan drastically simplified the tax code in 1986 by
| eliminating a ton of deductions and expanding the standard
| deduction. [1]
|
| (It also lowered the top tax rate from 50% to 28%, and
| raised the bottom tax rate from 11% to 15%, so it wasn't a
| complete win).
|
| For all its faults, the Trump admin also nearly doubled [2]
| the standard deduction in 2017, which hugely simplifies
| taxes for the people who choose to use it.
|
| From Wikipedia:
|
| > The standard deduction nearly doubles, from $12,700 to
| $24,000 for married couples. For single filers, the
| standard deduction will increase from $6,350 to $12,000.
| About 70% of families choose the standard deduction rather
| than itemized deductions; this could rise to over 84% if
| doubled.
|
| Much of the information that TurboTax asks for is just help
| you figure out _whether or not_ to choose the standard
| deduction. (At least that 's what Intuit claims, but if you
| don't opt-out of the data sharing agreement, they get to
| have an absolute field day with all the financial data
| you've given them).
|
| But if you choose the standard deduction, the logic is
| usually quite simple, and you don't need massively complex
| software to help you.
|
| [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tax-Reform-Act
|
| [2] https://www.investopedia.com/taxes/trumps-tax-reform-
| plan-ex...
| jessaustin wrote:
| _But if you choose the standard deduction, the logic is
| usually quite simple, and you don 't need massively
| complex software to help you._
|
| This is true. Since the turbotax web form seems to help
| many taxpayers (the other possibility is that it's all
| SEO?), it might be nice if IRS ran an analogous web form
| in addition to what they do now.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| You're right. I haven't done that in awhile. Thank you for
| the reminder.
| ncphil wrote:
| PACER should have been free from the beginning. Gatekeeping legal
| information for profit (even if only used to supplement
| appropriations) isn't only a problem at the federal level. In
| many states you need a commercial subscription to even read court
| opinions and statutes, let alone search. Localities in most
| places rely on commercial publishers to archive the text of
| ordinances, which only those with ridiculously expensive
| subscriptions can access. The digitization of everything had just
| begun when I retired, but the handwriting was already on the
| wall. The contrast with the widespread availability of technical
| doc is staggering: and reminds me of why I changed careers.
| cwkoss wrote:
| A similar injustice is that many building codes are privately
| copyrighted AND enforced by law.
| criddell wrote:
| They are privately copyrighted because those organizations
| research and develop the codes which is a significant
| expense.
|
| Since it's unlikely that taxpayers will accept paying for all
| of this stuff, the likely outcome is that specific code
| references will be removed from the law and replaced with an
| insurance requirement. And insurers are going to require the
| ferris wheel or elevator or boiler to comply with the same
| code that used to be in the law.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Forcing people to buy privately owned IP to comply with the
| law is effectively a tax. Taxpayers are still paying - it's
| just political money laundering.
| gowld wrote:
| It's a user fee, which is reasonable way to tax non-
| basic-needs.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| There should be no user-fee on being able to know the
| law. That's the point, not that non-governmental
| organizations shouldn't be compensated if their work is
| used, required, or referenced by a law.
| my123 wrote:
| Being able to access to the law itself is a basic need.
| gambiting wrote:
| I honestly feel like America is on a different planet
| sometimes. If it's required by law, then it should be free
| to read. What do you mean organizations research and
| develop codes at an expense? What organisations? Anyone
| other than the government is in charge of setting up the
| law? That doesn't ring any alarm bells there?
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Organizations such as everyone that works on standards at
| ISO, IEEE, etc. Should they be free to read? Yes! How am
| I supposed to comply with a law I can read, but can't
| follow? But the government doesn't need to do everything.
| In fact, quite a few laws defer to "best industry
| practices".
| gambiting wrote:
| Of course, but these organisations, even if private
| entities, will be paid by the government to conduct
| research and offer best practices and advice, so if the
| taxpayer is already paying for it....then it should be
| free to read - OP made it sound as if private
| organisations conducted research out of their own good
| will and therefore it was justified to charge the public
| for it.....which is fine, but not if the rules become
| law!
| criddell wrote:
| Today the government usually doesn't pay them. They fund
| themselves by selling paper and electronic copies of the
| code. The idea is that if you are designing some type of
| equipment, then you should help pay for the development
| of the code governing that equipment.
|
| It maybe makes sense for esoteric things but not at all
| for common things (like the building and electrical codes
| covering all houses.
|
| Edit: Sometimes private organizations did write the codes
| for their members and later the government notices that's
| what everybody is using and it's working, so make it the
| law of the land.
| fl0wenol wrote:
| It's frustrating that the government doesn't step in to
| pay/fund on behalf of the public in situations like that.
| Standards organizations should want such a guaranteed
| income stream.
| criddell wrote:
| > If it's required by law, then it should be free to
| read.
|
| Nobody really disagrees with that. Most of the codes are
| available in paper form in libraries.
|
| Organizations like the ASME (https://www.asme.org/) write
| the codes and they do a pretty good job.
| monocasa wrote:
| Right? This idea literally goes back to the Code of
| Hammurabi.
| omegaworks wrote:
| >I honestly feel like America is on a different planet
| sometimes.
|
| "America" is a loosely-coupled minimum-viable veneer over
| private capital. As built, extraction and concentration
| of value is the primary purpose of the system. The roots
| of this settler-colony are still visible.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| You're being downvoted because people just want everything
| to be free without ever paying for it or doing any work to
| achieve it. They're the same people who expect politicians
| to fix everything for them, rather than us having to
| personally get involved in solving societal problems.
| MAGZine wrote:
| The supreme court recently upheld that people are legally
| allowed to know the laws that govern them without paying.
|
| https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-1150_7m58.pd
| f
|
| Only on hackernews would you read a comment saying that its
| fine for some corporation to hold the copyright on the law
| of the land.
| criddell wrote:
| I didn't say it's fine and in another comment I added
| that nobody disagrees that codes referenced by laws
| should be freely available, but the organizations making
| those codes do need to be compensated.
|
| How happy would you be if you were an engineer who
| developed a set of equations around some dangerous piece
| of equipment and your consulting business was built
| around selling your expertise. Then the state government
| comes along and says "nice work, now it's the law".
|
| I don't know how you get around the insurance backdoor
| that I mentioned. Any ideas?
|
| Edit: Looking at the link you posted, that seems to be
| specifically about annotations to the law. How does it
| cover codes incorporated by reference? It might be right
| there and I'm not seeing it. I'm not used to reading
| these types of materials.
| shawnz wrote:
| > How happy would you be if you were an engineer who
| developed a set of equations ... Then the state
| government comes along and says "nice work, now it's the
| law".
|
| Personally, I'd be ecstatic if my work could have such a
| wide reaching impact as that
| criddell wrote:
| I get that, but surely you understand how others might be
| upset at effectively losing the copyright on their work.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| You can't copyright equations to begin with so this
| wouldn't be an issue.
| elliekelly wrote:
| The organizations don't write model code because they
| want to own the copyright they write model code so they,
| an unelected entity, can exercise an inordinate amount of
| power over legislation and draft regulations that further
| the business interests and line the pockets of their
| members.
|
| Even without copyright protection the special interest
| groups will continue writing model code exactly as they
| were except that member corps might have to kick in a bit
| more money now that ordinary citizens won't be
| subsidizing their efforts to manipulate the democratic
| process.
| sgent wrote:
| That was a very fact specific case that ruled that the GA
| legislature's copyright on the GA code was invalid. It's
| a stretch to expand that to something like the National
| Electrical Code or International Building Code since
| those copyrights are not owned by a legislature.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Thank you for that. I hadn't seen that case before. I
| sued the State here in Illinois a couple of years ago
| because I tried to FOIA some statutes and was rejected
| under the copyright exemption. The State even had their
| database admin come to testify that they paid thousands
| of dollars a month to LexisNexis. I cited all the
| previous district court and appellate rulings (from other
| circuits), but ultimately lost.
| fibers wrote:
| The same can be said about research colleges being
| backstopped by the taxpayer and having their research being
| paywalled by JSTOR. Are you willing to make the argument
| that all of this stuff should be paywalled?
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I don't care. The law should be free, period. Cheaper to
| pay once through the legislature than to put a paywall on
| it.
| criddell wrote:
| Cheaper for some, more expensive for others.
|
| Even though you aren't likely to build a petroleum
| distillation column in your apartment, you don't mind
| helping to pay for the ongoing R&D involved in producing
| the engineering codes governing that equipment? For
| esoteric stuff like that, I kind of like the user-fee
| model. If we all pay, it feels like another subsidy to
| (in this case) oil and gas companies.
| duped wrote:
| The taxpayers are already paying for this.
| criddell wrote:
| Are you thinking of one code in particular? I'm sure
| there are some that came out of academia and those likely
| are freely available.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| If you start dabbling in DIY remodeling you'll soon find
| yourself trying understand parts of the national electrical
| and plumbing codes. They actually remind me a lot of reading
| the C++XX standards--clearly the product of a ton of time and
| effort by a bunch really smart and experienced people.
| There's no way in hell an elected body could/should ever
| wrote those. So, while I'm not saying that the current system
| is ideal or even fair, there's absolutely a need to
| compensate somebody to write and maintain these standards.
| reaperducer wrote:
| It's getting even worse than that. In some cities and counties,
| you have to pay to read real estate records online. Public
| documents that were free just a few years ago are now behind
| paywalls. Even though my tax dollars paid for these systems
| that were supposed to make the public documents public.
|
| Want to read it for free? Come on down to the courthouse, fill
| out a paper form, and we'll find the right book for you. Also
| for a fee.
|
| See also: GIS systems.
| Infernal wrote:
| Yup. And then charge you a dollar a page to make copies.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Technical docs are better but far from perfect. For example,
| could you please link me to a copy of the C++ standard? It's
| ISO/IEC 14882:2020, if that helps.
| roblabla wrote:
| The drafts are available in openstd, both of older versions
| of the standard[0], and the next, upcoming version[1].
|
| Those are not technically the _actual_ standards, but they
| 're pretty close. But yes, I too dislike the fact that ISO
| standards are paid for. You know what bugs me the most? ISO
| 9660, the standard behind the .iso file format. It's been
| published in 1988, and today still costs roughly 130EUR to
| buy...
|
| [0]: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/standards
|
| [1]: https://github.com/cplusplus/draft
| javajosh wrote:
| The central dictum of the legal profession: "you will have to
| pry every piece of the leverage I have over you out of my cold,
| dead hands."
| rz2k wrote:
| Aaron Swartz should be credited for his early activism in support
| of making this public good accessible.[1]
|
| I suspect that it played a role in how vicious the prosecutor
| Carmen Ortiz was in _United States v. Aaron Swartz_ , the later
| case about bulk downloading of research on JSTOR from the MIT
| library system, and which eventually lead to his suicide.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#PACER
| newbamboo wrote:
| Was curious what that prosecutor had gotten up to.
| https://theintercept.com/2021/02/15/marty-walsh-aaron-swartz...
|
| Live by the sword...
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Her fatal mistake was not knowing that rubbing shoulders with
| people who operate on the national stage and having ambitions
| to be one of them herself meant she had to care about optics
| at that level. And driving a college kid to suicide over
| what's basically alleged petty theft is rather tactless in
| that context. Driving a college kid to suicide over
| allegations of what basically amounts giving "the system" the
| bird with a side of petty theft would have gone over just
| fine at the state level.
| mminer237 wrote:
| It's good to see when good tools, like RECAP, become obsolete
| because of wider improvements. Mission accomplished.
|
| It's also good to see unanimous bipartisan action doing simple
| good things.
| zestyping wrote:
| As one of the developers of RECAP, I am delighted to see the
| project become obsolete!
| kingcharles wrote:
| PACER's paywall is bullshit, but just to temper things it does
| allow you to download a certain amount for free. I think it might
| be something like $30 a month. All my requests usually come in
| under this amount.
|
| What are the fees if you go to the courthouse? I've actually
| never been inside a federal courthouse despite litigating there
| for almost a decade. I assume they have an indigency application
| if you can't afford their fees - the state courts I've worked at
| do.
|
| You have a 1st Amendment right to court documents (and usually a
| constitutional or statutory right under state laws too). I don't
| know exactly how fees interact with your 1st Am. right. I would
| imagine that if you wanted a lot of documents and couldn't afford
| them that your 1st Am. right would win if you sued for it.
| 1024core wrote:
| It just boggles the mind that in a society ruled by laws, access
| to said laws would be locked up behind a paywall.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| It's not that unusual. PACER's pricing was ridiculous, but, in
| principle and from a historical perspective, having to pay for
| access to information has been the norm. And for understandable
| reasons. Only a generation ago, access to court records
| naturally cost money, because neither paper nor file clerks'
| time is free.
|
| It's only within the past couple decades that technology has
| reduced the costs associated with providing public access to
| court records down to a level where it's easy to contemplate
| making the service free to all users as part of the public
| budget.
| robflynn wrote:
| I was shocked the first time I needed to download something
| from PACER and saw that the pricing was per-page (of a PDF!)
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Per-page is pretty common in the legal industry generally.
| It's a holdover from the paper days, when the provider's
| costs were more a function of page count than document
| count.
| bell-cot wrote:
| The old "He who has the gold makes the rules" trick works even
| better when those without the gold only get to learn the rules
| when & where convenient to those with. Or they have to give up
| whatever silver they've managed to scrape together in order to
| learn _some_ of the _current_ rules.
| cyral wrote:
| It reminds me of how ISO standards, from date specifications,
| to the hz for the musical note "A", to railway engineering,
| have to be purchased from ISO just for the PDF.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> It reminds me of how ISO standards, from date
| specifications, to the hz for the musical note "A", to
| railway engineering, have to be purchased from ISO just for
| the PDF. _
|
| At eye-watering rates.
|
| https://webstore.ansi.org/Search/Find?st=iso&v=5&cp=1&f1=Sta.
| ..
| tiahura wrote:
| They are not. Court of appeals decisions (a decision that's of
| precedential value) and any district court decision of
| importance are public already.
|
| This makes public district court opinions nobody cares about
| (ok I suppose), as well as the pleadings and motions filed by
| the parties in the case. Those documents contain a treasure
| trove of private information that wasn't disclosed with the
| expectation of broad public dissemination.
| tiahura wrote:
| Terrible news.
|
| Federal court isn't personal information mother lode that state
| courts would be, but there's all sorts of stuff in there that
| doesn't need to be widely disseminated. If you're just interested
| in the occasional document, that's already free. This is just
| going to enable the worst sort of data harvesting.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| The pricing is per page, not per document. One larger document
| can go over the free threshold.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Courts already allow you to request that documents be flagged
| as sensitive.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| I understand your concern, but you're advocating for a form of
| security-through-obscurity. Data harvesting of this information
| is already available to bad actors. If information must be
| private for security reasons, it should not be in the public
| court records in the first place.
| tiahura wrote:
| It's already available to anyone. Your first $X / month is
| free, and after that, it's like $.10 page. Or, you can drive
| to the courthouse and snoop for free all day long.
|
| Mostly, this just facilitates more adtech and profile
| building. I don't see the benefit.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Can you provide a citation for the proposition that rate-
| limiting is a form of security-through-obscurity? That seems
| like a pretty novel interpretation to me.
| IncandescentGas wrote:
| I think you're right. Pacer is basically free for any of us
| wanting to look something up reasonably. The people that care
| are the people that want to harvest the data contained therein
| and sell it, use it for extortion, or use it to deny the
| reformed ex-con underclass access to housing, jobs and credit.
| [deleted]
| afarrell wrote:
| On the one hand, this is a good thing for the easy ability to
| access public information.
|
| On the other hand, this removes an important backup source of
| funding for the US federal courts.
|
| On the gripping hand, it is bonkers that court admins are wise to
| prepare for the 2023 government shutdown.
| trhway wrote:
| Somewhen during this year Santa Clara Superior Court removed case
| documents from their online case access, now only dates and
| parties are available there. So much for the progress, and that
| in Silicon Valley :) During physical access to the case documents
| at the court building one is prohibited from using say phone or
| any other camera.
| kragen wrote:
| If this had passed fifteen years ago, the FBI would never have
| launched their investigation into Aaron Swartz, the one preceding
| the MIT prosecution. Maybe he'd still be alive.
| ccleve wrote:
| The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts is obviously
| incompetent to carry out this work. Anyone who demands nine years
| to do this shouldn't be taken seriously.
|
| All documents should simply be dumped into a common repository.
| S3 would do fine. Define some standards for common document
| metadata so each document is identified by case, author, type,
| etc. Enable S3 version histories.
|
| Then create an API for creating cases and uploading documents.
| This will require some controls, logins, security, and some
| facility for billing users for filing fees. If the court just
| provides an API, they can stop there.
|
| Private companies who want to provide a user interface to lawyers
| and the public can do so. I'm sure that more than a few will make
| searches and document downloads free.
|
| And that's it. If the government would just get out of the way,
| this could be done in six months to a year and would be very,
| very cheap.
| kingcharles wrote:
| I want to make one more comment and then I am done. Access to the
| federal court system is a bargain. An absolute bargain. You can
| usually file a case for about $350-400, and the fees are tempered
| or removed if you can prove indigency. You get a LOT for your
| money if your case is legitimate. You can potentially eat up
| hundreds of hours of court room (judge, clerk) time, which is
| clearly tens of thousands of dollars worth of work.
|
| The court system is incredibly subsidized in the USA.
|
| Shame about the lawyer fees....!
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