Federal Court Attempts To Restrict Use Of RECAP By PACER Users

Court Tells Users They Can't Use RECAP | Techdirt. The fight over publicly accessible primary law at the Federal level is getting interesting. PACER attempts to fund the production of Federal case dockets on the Internet by user fees. You have to subscribe to use the official service. However, many clever people, knowing that the dockets are free, open public records, have been devising ways to make them accessible outside the PACER service. On the one hand, you can't blame the Federal courts for seeking a method of funding that doesn't depend on the largesse of fickle legislators. On the other hand, this is the people's law, and it belongs to the people. On the third hand, user fees are used to provide funding for all sorts of Government services; you have to pay admission fees to use a lot of Government stuff. The current fight is over a public domain initiative surrounding RECAP (yes, PACER backwards), which is a Firefox extension that uploads PACER dockets automatically to the Internet Archive, (which, by the way, is a great place to do research) every time a subscriber accesses something. The Federal Court for the District of Massachusetts recently started prohibiting fee-exempt users of its service from using RECAP. On the one hand, this seems reasonable, as the service is giving these users free access to PACER documents. On the other hand, this only makes sense if you believe the Government should be able to charge user fees for public domain document access. On the other, other hand, should access to public domain case dockets be a public service paid for by taxes? On the other, other, other hand, I don't know how the Court plans to police the types of browsers and extensions that are used by exempt subscribers. My head is starting to hurt.