Home » Posts tagged 'pacer' (Page 6)
Tag Archives: pacer
Begins In July: PACER Training Pilot Project From Admin. of U.S. Courts, GPO, AALL
From an Announcement by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts: A pilot project aimed at having public libraries enhance the public’s knowledge and use of the federal judiciary’s Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) service begins July 1, 2011. Two libraries – the Library of Congress in the District of Columbia and the Law Library for San Bernadino, California – will kick off the pilot, but up to 50 additional public libraries may join them in future months. PACER allows users to obtain case information from federal courts without having to visit the courthouse. The service allows an Internet user to request information about a particular case or party, and makes the data immediately available for printing or downloading at a cost of 8 cents per page. In the pilot project, libraries will conduct at least one training class for the general public every three months, and offer training or refresher opportunities for library staff at least one a year. Those staff members, in turn, may assist library patrons in the use of PACER. For participating libraries, the first $50 of PACER use fees each quarter will be waived. The pilot is a joint undertaking of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, the Government Printing Office, and the American Association of Law Libraries. (via INFOdocket.com) Continue reading
FDsys Court Opinions Project and PACER
GPO has announced that it is partnering with the Federal Judiciary to create a one-year pilot program providing free public access to court opinions through GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys).
This seems to be a laudable project, but it is important to note that this is not free access to PACER. PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is a fee-based service of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.
Document Coverage. The GPO pilot project will only provide access to court opinions. PACER provides access to court opinions and more:
- a Case Locator service (a national index for U.S. district, bankruptcy, and appellate courts)
- listings of all parties and participants including judges, attorneys and trustees
- compilations of case related information such as cause of action, nature of suit and dollar demand
- chronologies of dates of case events entered in the case record
- A claims registry
- A listing of new cases each day in all courts
- Judgments or case status
Court Coverage.The GPO project will begin by providing access to 12 courts and expand to 42 when fully implemented. PACER provides access to 216 federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts.
Fees. The GPO project will provide free access to opinions from selected courts. PACER provides only limited free access. Although the GPO announcement says, "Free access to opinions in all Federal courts is currently available via the Judiciary's Public Access to Court Electronic Records service (PACER)," this is not strictly true. PACER charges for each search and for each page of documents retrieved and then "waives" the first $10 of charges in each quarterly billing cycle. (Expanded PACER Fee Waiver.) The PACER fee schedule includes price caps and exceptions making it is hard for any particular user to accurately predict whether any particular information need can be met for free or if a large fee will be imposed. As noted here and here, and here, fees can mount up quickly, restrict use, and limit access.
Document Formats. Although the GPO announcement is not explicit about the formats of documents that it will make a available, FDsys typically makes documents available in PDF and plain text. PACER makes information available in PDF, HTML, and (apparently) plain text output from databases. (See FAQ 'How do you determine what a "page" is for billing purposes?') As noted here, formats matter and neither GPO nor PACER have committed to providing structured, tagged, machine-actionable formats.
The future.
Court decisions are a vital part of public information. One recent survey listed PACER access as third in a list of the "Most Wanted Federal Documents." (Show Us the Data: Most Wanted Federal Documents, By Center for Democracy & Technology & OpenTheGovernment.org, March 2009.) If the GPO pilot project is successful, I would hope that it could expand to include more courts and more of the content that is now available through PACER.
It is my understanding, however, that there was a PACER presentation at the spring Depository Library Council meeting and the Council is working on a recommendation to expand a PACER fee waiver in depository libraries. Although I do not have the details of that proposal, it certainly sounds like an attempt to re-intermediate libraries in an age of disintermediation. Such attempts usually fail. (See FGI response to Ithaka draft values proposition for the FDLP and Public comments on Ithaka FDLP Modeling Project draft documents (II) for more on the disintermediation issue.)
A previous PACER free pilot project was stopped abruptly when officials got upset that their system was being used too much. (Is PACER a portent of things to come?.) A similar attempt by GPO to provide a service for free inside depository library buildings and charging a fee for that same service outside those buildings failed. (This was the early days of the FDsys predecessor, GPO Access; see Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program.) The attempt by the Library of Congress to produce a restricted access "e-LCSH" was apparently abandoned.
The current PACER FAQ says that "information gathered from the PACER system is a matter of public record and may be reproduced without permission" but also warns that "misuse" (which "includes, but is not limited to, using an automated process to repeatedly access those portions of the PACER application that do not assess a fee") "is strictly prohibited and may result in criminal prosecution or civil action." It seems clear that the courts continue to resist true free access to this information. We can only hope that the current GPO/FDsys project will help turn that attitude around.
Continue readingMore courts to offer audio recordings — for a fee through PACER
More Federal Courts Move to Offer Digital Audio Recordings Online, The Third Branch, United States Courts, (November 2010). According to Stephen Schultze, It is "worth noting that during the pilot period of this service, the fee for the audio files was $.08. This highlights the arbitrary nature of pricing for internet-delivered electronic court documents. Does the current pricing meet the statutory requirement (28 USC 1913 note) that the "Judicial Conference may, only to the extent necessary, prescribe reasonable fees... to reimburse expenses incurred in providing these services"? Continue reading
My $3.52 Worth of PACER
As you might have noticed, I was inspired to register for a PACER account because of the presentation from the Six State Virtual Conference. Today I'd like to share my brief initial experience with PACER. I received my password a few hours after applying for it. Today I logged into PACER and decided to look for documents related to Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger. I realize that some documents in this case are already publicly available, but I wanted something to search that I knew would be in the system. First I clicked on the database link for the Northern District of California, since I knew the case was heard in San Francisco. The resulting search screen offered my several choices, including searching by attorney name. I tried Theodore Olsen, knowing he was one of the attorneys. I got back two cases, but neither was Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger. I was charged $0.08. According to PACER documentation, I would have been charged $0.08 even if I had zero results. So I did a quick Google search to learn that Perry's first name was Kristen and did a party search for Kristen Perry. I immediately got Case Number 3:09-ev-02292-VRW, better known as Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger. This also cost me $0.08, but since I got a useful result, I didn't mind. I looked at the Case Summary ($0.08). I looked at the Case File Location ($0.08) and determined the case files might still be with Judge Walker. Then I looked at the Docket Report. There were 742 files associated with the case. PACER determined that this should be charged as 30 pages or $2.40. Browsing through the list I decided to pull up a 10 page letter from "Voter X" which was sent to Judge Walker during the trial. This person said they feared retaliation from pro-same sex marriage forces and represented themselves as just one of the many voters who voted for Prop 8. The letter was written like a legal brief and I suspect the author was an attorney or paralegal. Viewing and downloading this letter cost me $0.80. By now I had spent $3.52. PACER waives $10/quarter, so if I stop here, I won't be charged this quarter. But what if I wanted to look at multiple documents?. At $0.08 a page, I had 81 pages left. And if I reloaded the Docket Report a few times instead of remembering to open documents into a new browser tab, I could have only opened up a document or two before getting charged for real, because each refresh of the Docket Report would have been another $2.40/30 pages. I started playing with PACER to see if it was worth recommending registration to those library patrons looking to retrieve federal court documents. I need to think about it some more, but at the moment my feeling is that $10.00 worth of free access doesn't go very far. And it would probably be used up quickest by the very patrons I would want to recommend it to. Folks who may want a lot of briefs and filings but who are not great searchers. But I haven't totally made up my mind about this. What do you think? If you work in a non-court library, have you gotten patrons to register for PACER? What has been your experience? I do suggest that librarians should register for PACER accounts and search around to see what's available. Then decide for yourselves whether to lobby Congress to free this resource so people can explore the law without watching the meter. Continue reading
Is PACER a portent of things to come?
February 5, 2011 / Leave a comment
Steve Schultze, who is Associate Director of The Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton, gives an excellent history and background to the fee-based PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) system and various attempts to make this public information freely available.
- PACER, RECAP, and the Movement to Free American Case Law, by Steve Schultze, VoxPopuLII, LII / Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School (February 3, 2011).
A lot of this information will be old news if you've been following the story over the years, but I've never seen it all brought together so thoroughly in one place with so many good links before. Schultze summarizes the problem: The sad irony of the PACER fiasco is seeing government officials get upset when their system was being used during a free trial. (They complained because "One request was being made every three seconds"!) They shut down the free-access trial to put a stop to that! And they initiated an FBI investigation of those who were using the system so heavily! In a different world, a government agency would be proud to see its information being heavily used and valued by the public; governments would develop policies, missions, and budgets to encourage this. But PACER generates money through its fees and, in a world in which "cost recovery" and "self sustaining programs" and "pay as you go" and restrictions on access are valued more than free public access, free use is anathema. There is a lesson for all of us here. Budgets are bad and governments are cutting back drastically. We are sure to see rollbacks in free access; restrictions put on access or reuse or both; fees imposed; information taken offline because it is "too expensive" to keep online. Some agencies will fight these restrictions, but will be hard-put to find the resources and support to win those battles. Those agencies will need our help. Other agencies will welcome the excuse to have stricter control over what they reveal and what they hide; they will welcome the opportunity to raise money on their information "assets." We will have to fight those agencies. In general, the economic situation in the nation means that we are going to have to fight to maintain free public access to government information. Free access to information on the web will not be a given at a time when governments are slashing budgets and politicians are campaigning to reduce government services and outsource those services to the private (fee-based) sector. We can certainly fight politically by lobbying and supporting causes we believe in. But we also can fight using our own resources and making our own choices. One way we can do that is to get that information off of government-controlled servers and into the hands of our community libraries where our communities are in control of access. This goes against the now common idea that "everything is on the web" so we don't have to have local collections any more. On the contrary, this is the very time that we need to build digital collections to ensure long term preservation of that information and long-term free public access to it. "Self sustaining" government agencies are the enemy of free public access. We have a lot of flexibility in the digital age; "communities" no longer have to be geographically-based. Every library can have communities-of-interest and users anywhere. Libraries that are confused about their role should see this as a clear, unambiguous opportunity. Rather than shirking the responsibility of building collections and hoping that someone else will keep information freely available, libraries can seize the opportunity to do what no one else is doing: build free digital public libraries. Providing actual collections (rather than links to content that may or may not be there tomorrow) will engender support (and funding) better than vague promises of user-assistance. Providing actual services built on top of those locally-controlled collections will attract users at a time when users are ignoring services-without-collections-libraries in favor of google. The easiest place to start building digital collections is with public domain government information. (Is any library downloading all the documents at fcic.gov? Someone should -- before it is too late!) Continue reading →Continue Reading →