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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

For anyone curious, this is part of a broader project to democratize access to often difficult-to-obtain or paywalled court opinions across many different jurisdictions, among other things.

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Potentially stupid question: why is this a paid thing at all? Aren't court dockets public information?

Not a dumb question. PACER costs some money to maintain, and the fees it charges also pays for the digital maintenance/upgrade of the court system overall. But there's substantial criticism that the fees it charges are still very excessive (10 cents per page, despite the actual cost of storage+retrieval being 1/20,000th of a cent), especially because it's taxpayer funded:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/us/politics/pacer-fees-la...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/pacer-court-recor...

https://qz.com/283772/why-pacer-should-and-should-not-be-lik...

Not at all a stupid question. PACER's fees have been a source of controversy for years. They charge $0.10 per page or a max of $3 per document. There's been litigation about the fees[1], but it's still working its way through the court system. A couple of bills that eliminate the fees have been filed to in Congress over the last year or so, but they haven't gone anywhere.

It's also an incredibly technically outdated and user unfriendly system, so even without fees it would be worth scraping.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PACER_(law)#Litigation_over_fe...

It depends, but if they are public they still charge an obscene amount of money to get access to them. Sometimes like $0.50 per page and a $20 fee upfront for administrative costs. Pacer ain't cheap either. This will be a Godsend.

They are public. You can always go to the courthouse and use one of the computers to download documents for free.

Also, PACER bills quarterly, and your first $50 is free. Of course, if you are a party to the case, you can download for free as well.

Viewing them is free. Printing them is not. Also, you're assuming that the public access terminal is a computer. In some places, the "terminals" are human clerks, and the turnaround for searches are days to weeks.

And only the first $15 is free, but if you spend $16, you get charged the whole $16, not $1.

It's $15, not $50.

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