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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how long this has taken. I had to use PACER in the late 00s, and it wasn't just the fees that were bad, it was the whole stinking system, from billing to UI. It wouldn't surprise me if it was designed by the same contractor that built TESS for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (another fed website sorely in need of an overhaul).

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There have been mitigation efforts such as RECAP [1] (and Court Listener [2]), where documents are shuffled off to the Internet Archive when you're using PACER with a browser extension installed, but this is welcome news as this data should be freely available considering the costs involved. Tremendous win for open data advocacy, but there is still work to be done.

> Thanks to our users and our data consulting projects, the RECAP Archive contains tens of millions of PACER documents, including every free opinion in PACER. Everything in the archive is fully searchable, including millions of pages that were originally scanned PDFs. Everything that is in the RECAP Archive is also regularly uploaded to the Internet Archive, where it has a lasting home. This amounts to thousands of liberated documents daily. Finally, we make the RECAP Archive available via an API or as bulk data for journalists, researchers, startups, and developers.

My hope is that one day everything in PACER has been retrieved out for storage in the Internet Archive, and the ongoing costs for keeping the collection up to date are trivial. The user fee waiver per quarter has been raised to $30; please consider using RECAP if you're a PACER user!

[1] https://free.law/recap/

[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/

> this data should be freely available considering the costs involved

The purpose of the fees is to cover the costs incurred by the court system in managing the document system so that it's self-funding rather than being paid out of the government's general revenue. In other words, while the costs required for publishing any particular document are miniscule, the point is to provide revenue for the court system.

I'm not defending it, but that's the reason the costs are so high and why the system still exists. To get rid of the PACER fees you need to convince Republican congressmen to "subsidize" the court system.

CourtListener expenses are less than $100k/year for providing storage and indexing of the PACER documents they have [1] (the Internet Archive also keeps a copy as mentioned in my above comment). There is room for the court's costs to decline substantially, and those cost control pressures on the judiciary's technology budget are what I'm interested in seeing. They are asking for far more than what they need from their user fees. I am not against reasonable user fees (I said "freely" above, and that's my faux pax), but very much against gouging because of politicians and bureaucrats.

For funsies, let's assume the entire PACER corpus is 10TB (edit: appears to be closer to 250-300 TB). Let's also assume that you want all of it OCRd, indexed, and available over a web interface and an API. Let's also assume a staff of ~5 technologists to oversee such a system. What do you think a reasonable annual budget would be for such a system? I would argue no more than $2-3 million. Let's Encrypt (non-profit for public certs) has a budget of $3.6 million and employees 13 people (as of 2019).

Perhaps the judiciary should just pay Free Law Project to host PACER, they’ve already proven they can provide a superior product cost effectively.

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/46334... (Free Law Project, 2018 990-EZ, Line 17, total expenses)

Supposedly (according to the Free Law project) the size of PACER is probably closer to 250-300 TB. Your point still applies though.

https://free.law/2016/10/10/the-cost-of-pacer-data-around-on...

I'm the director of Free Law Project. For the case mentioned in the article we actually did a full expert testimony figuring out roughly how much per page it'd cost to run PACER using AWS GovCloud and a handful of other assumptions.

It was...half a ten thousandth of a penny per page, IIRC: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-...

Given how much the courts rely on case law, court records should be as free and publicly indexed as statutes are.

Legal opinions are free on PACER.

I’m sure that there is plenty of creative cost allocation going on.

Years ago, at a revenue funded program in a non-Federal setting, one of our roles was furnishing the organization. They would use a 5 year depreciation cycle and move groups of people every few years, leaving depreciated office furniture behind and buying new/newer stuff at the new office.

You could trace the movement by color selections. The orange and vomit green legacy of the 1970s was replaced by pottery barn colors from a swatch that one of the big shots kept in her desk. Furniture was used midrange commercial stuff instead of WW2 (literally) surplus desks and prison chairs. They would add little touches like getting posters and artwork from regional tourism groups and leftover event posters from local festivals to decorate. (Typically for free)

On some pages on the Free Law site (creators of RECAP), they talk about why the fees are way too high to "cover the costs incurred by the court system". PACER brings in over $100 million per year.

[1] https://free.law/2016/11/14/how-much-money-does-pacer-make/

[2] https://free.law/2016/10/10/the-cost-of-pacer-data-around-on...

It’s better (faster and less twitchy) than Facebook.

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