And once you log in, the government's courthouse search engine known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records or PACER, will charge you 8 cents a page to read documents that are in the public domain a fee that earned the federal judiciary $50 million in profits in 2006.
With its high cost and limited functionality, critics call the system an absurdity in the era of Google, blogs and Wikipedia, where information is free and bandwidth, disk space and processing power are nearly so. “The PACER system is the most broken part of our federal legal mechanism," says Carl Malamud, who runs the nonprofit open-government group Public.Resource.Org ."They have a mainframe mentality."
Now Malamud is doing something about it. He's asking lawyers to donate their PACER documents one by one, which he then classifies and bundles into ZIP files published for free at his organization's website. The one-year-old effort has garnered him 20 percent of all the files on PACER, including all decisions from federal appeals courts over the last 50 years.
The project is important, he says, because court filings are a part of the fabric of a democracy, and should be freely available to average citizens. “We are going after all primary legal materials in the U.S.," Malamud says. “That's part of America's OS, and we think it should be open source." Malamud is a man accustomed to finding ways to provide free and easy online access to government documents.
Back in 1995, the Securities and Exchange Committee decided to put corporate filings online only after Malamud essentially shamed them into doing so. For two years he operated a free site that published the filings, then abruptly pulled the plug and directed angry users to the SEC.
He's since won battles freeing the nation's catalog of copyrights, Oregon's book of state laws, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark database. Now, he's after congressional-hearing videos, expensive but copyright-free building codes, and the Code of Federal Regulations, in addition to all the court filings in the PACER database.
While Malamud's budget is only about $1 million annually, he has a matching grant from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's philanthropy group and help from influential tech friends like Tim O'Reilly, Paul Vixie and Larry Lessig. Malamud dreams of a day PACER's legal documents are free, so that academics and entrepreneurs can create custom search engines and new tools to make the information available to American citizens.
But that's what PACER does now, counters U.S. Courts spokesman Richard Carelli. “PACER is the greatest technological achievement in the court system in the last 20 years," Carelli says.
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