Most of you already know about the US Courts’ shameful profiteering through the PACER system. They charge $0.08/page for public court documents and in so doing stifle the public’s access to their own content. Not long ago, our friends at CITP released an open source project called RECAP. When you install this gem in your browser, documents your retrieve from PACER are deposited in a public archive, where they can be retrieved by everyone, at no cost, forever.
So no surprise that US Courts is now discouraging the use of the plugin. They stand to lose a lot of cash if these documents are free.
What surprised me first is this little gem:
A fee exemption applies only for limited purposes. Any transfer of data obtained as the result of a fee exemption is prohibited unless expressly authorized by the court. Therefore, fee exempt PACER customers must refrain from the use of RECAP. The prohibition on transfer of information received without fee is not intended to bar a quote or reference to information received as a result of a fee exemption in a scholarly or other similar work.
I'm the Chief Technology Strategist for the Red Hat US Public Sector group, an open source and free culture advocate, a picky drinker, an amateur aesthete, and a dog enthusiast.
