I actually approve of the something closer to the status quo here. Court filings contain a lot of sensitive information about the litigants.

It is one thing for the records to be publicly available, as they must be. It is a very different thing for every speck of material in them to be instantly available to anyone, anywhere, worldwide, for any purpose.

▲

EMIRELADERO 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Material that shouldn't be published for any reason is already subject to a sealing process. What else is needed?

	▲	3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

▲

monooso 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't that basically the same as saying court filings should be available, but not to poor people?

▲

IncandescentGas 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No. They should be available for legit use cases and not available for data scrapers who will use it to facilitate algorithmic housing and employment discrimination. Especially not available for scammers who make mugshot extortion websites.

	▲	bsder an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed. The issue isn't with individuals having access to the data but with aggregation of said data.

▲

anon373839 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No. Indigent users can already request fee exemptions, and that can be expanded. Access can be provided at courthouses and public libraries. (I don’t know if that is already a practice for PACER specifically, but it should be.)

	▲	calebio 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You can easily burn through hundreds of dollars researching one or two relatively small court cases. I don't think you should be indigent or go to the courthouse/public library to avoid spending hundreds of dollars for that small amount of research.
	▲	DangitBobby 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		There's "can't afford" and "can't justify the expense". I'm certainly not poor and at basically no amount above free would I justify the expense. So any cost is completely unacceptable, especially given how much the public pays to produce these results. No more excuses, no more lame justifications, no more hiding.
	▲	mjd 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		PACER fees are waived if they are under $15 per quarter. That's about 150 pages of material.

▲

nonethewiser 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Then why do you think they should be public?

▲

cogman10 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it should be public to be a general check the public can engage with against judges, cops, and court participants.

Consider cases like Cash for Kids. It potentially could have been caught a lot quicker if we had the data publicly available to see "How does this judge usually rule". Today, proving that a judge has is bias is pretty hard, but imagine if we could see "This judge always denies motions when the claimant or their lawyers are Irish".

Or consider dirty cops. Imagine being able to search all the drug arrests of a cop and finding out "Hmm, this cop is finding meth on everyone he pulls over". That's a valuable tool for the next victim of the cop that gets accused of meth possession. As it currently stands, we basically rely on the cop not forgetting to cover their cameras.

Having more data available makes it easier systematic analysis and mining a whole lot easier.

▲

anon373839 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because “publicly available with some friction” has a fundamentally different character than “indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers”. That type of information access wasn't even fathomable when the concept of public records was born. It enables a lot of uses where I would argue that the harms outweigh the benefits.

▲

jasonfarnon 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

"Because “publicly available with some friction” has a fundamentally different character than “indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers”"

people have already forgotten the lessons of all those mugshots websites.

▲

runako 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers

Any fee that is acceptable for "normal use" is not high enough to deter the likes of Google or the big AI developers.

Google, a company that custom develops specialized automobiles to regularly drive ~all the streets in the world for the purposes of having imagery for a mapping app. Google, a company that (before it even got really rich), developed custom book-scanning technology to scan all the books it could acquire.

The big AI providers are in litigation now because even licensing terms that prevent use are no deterrent, they just stole the content they wanted to train their models.

The fee won't deter the cases you want, it will only harm the rest of us.

▲

fellowniusmonk 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, I think this is a bad take on the part of the EFF.

The full dataset will be in private hands and available everywhere to everyone to do anything the moment this goes live.

I protect data for a living, cost asymmetry and proof of work are really the only tools we have.

If this goes live, the next time I get subpoenaed to testify for something I'm going to throw in so many random but couched accusations at people just to screw them over when the data goes live at scale via data brokers and torrent dumps.

Bill Jones (accused in court testimony of killing puppies) is requesting the HOA get off of his back.

▲

Zak 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I see a valid point here, however, some court rulings create binding precedents. As I understand it, those can be paywalled in PACER. Binding precedents are part of the law everyone within the relevant jurisdiction is required to obey, and it is unjust for any part of the law to not be freely available.

It may be reasonable to put limits on free public access to records where there's a privacy concern.

▲

eurleif 3 hours ago | parent [-]

At least within the federal court system, binding precedent is already freely available. Only circuit courts and SCOTUS can create binding precedent, and the opinions of those courts are freely available on their respective sites, outside of PACER. E.g., here's the 9th circuit: https://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/decisions/opinions/

	▲	Zak 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's good to know. I did not know circuit court opinions were always available. The current system still doesn't sit right with me. Someone sufficiently wealthy has effectively unlimited access. Someone sufficiently poor with a lot of time on their hands might also have unlimited access. Everyone in the middle has a bottleneck.