The PACER system is where you find bankruptcy court information
DOJ paying the Judiciary is just moving money from one pocket to the other. As to whether PACER should be free, I tend to think so. 8 cents per page certainly isn’t going to break the bank, but it is vastly more than the actual cost of sending those electrons to my computer. In my view, the court system is going electronic for its own benefit. Things are being digitized anyway. Since that’s the case, there’s no particular reason why people ought to be charged to access the documents in the ordinary course. Large downloads from people seeking to create their own databases is one thing, because it’s trying to create value from public resources and taxes the system. But individuals and attorneys trying to obtain discrete documents or even all documents in a specific case is a different matter. A nominal charge might be appropriate - e.g., a minimal one-time registration fee - but charging 8 cents/page for every document is excessive, and a lower per-page fee makes it likelier that the processing costs of handling smaller charges will exceed the income. I don’t think the analogy to the copying machine holds up since copying machines require consumable supplies that have to be replaced and maintenance. PACER doesn’t have consumables, and the maintenance is nothing more than the ordinary maintenance the system requires for the court’s own purposes. The court doesn’t provide free copying machines, but if you take a docket for review and want to scan it with your portable scanner, they don’t charge you for that. PACER is I don’t think it really is a no cost service for the government. Someone is maintaining the software, someone scanned the documents that were not filed electronically, but it certainly is not significant in the long run. And neither is the cost to the consumer. And, since it generates revenue for the government, if we take that away, they will simply raise our taxes to make up for the lost revenue! much more like the portable scanner than a copying machine. the level of cost involved for the consumer is a matter of opinion, perspective and context. You can’t just make a blanket statement that it is insignificant. As far as I’m concerned, my quarterly PACER bill is significant enough that I am deterred from accessing public filings as freely as I wish to. 8 cents a page adds up real fast for me. So 8 cents a page is too expensive for this consumer. Countervailing all the discussion about cost is the consideration of public access. I think we can all agree that the more you charge per page, the less the public will access court filings. Less public access means less public scrutiny of the judicial process. I think the judicial process in this country could stand for more scrutiny. Even if it costs the courts 8 cents a page in foregone income. In short, this is a policy issue, not merely an issue of logistics. It was no so long ago that court files were not available to the general public, at all. The only way to get a file was to go to the court. The cost of retrieval services was more than 8 cents a page. As was the cost of the photocopier, regardless of who was making money off of it. There is no way that I could ever review the docket sheet for the Bankruptcy Court in for a particular case at any reasonable cost. Today, it costs me 8 cents. Maybe 24 cents. The cost of accessing court documents has declined dramaticly over the years. How is it possible that PACER costs are too high for an attorney? Unless you are a litigation junkie and like to read every document filed in cases that you are not involved in, i don’t understand how it is cost prohibitive. And my other point about pushing money around was not about whether they were making a profit or not. The 8 cents a page is going into the court’s revenue, and therefore calculated into their budget. If we take that 8 cents out, our tax dollars are going to replace it. There is a basic principle that court files are open to the public. Having a fee to look at the file, even if it is for remote viewing simply runs against the grain. Congress has mandated that the PACER fee be eliminated.
