Court Records Should Be Free

courtlistener and the Recap program fill a vital niche at the moment.

Recap takes any PACER document you purchase and automatically adds it to CourtListener for others to see/download.

Hopefully it will become obsolete soon!

So interesting point about things being public vs not:

If congressional votes are private, you never REALLY know if your congressperson is actually voting in your best interests. You only see certain bills pass and if they are in your favor, you can probably make some assumptions if they voted or not.

If the votes are public, now EVERYONE can see who they voted for. That sounds great! Then you realize that lobbyists can also see who the congressperson voted for. Lobbyists that have a lot more money and influence than you do. Lobbyists that can hold back millions if the vote is against their interests.

My point isn't that one format isn't better than the other. My point is that there are "no solutions, only tradeoffs"

>The bill would replace the aging PACER and CM/ECF systems with a modern, unified platform designed to improve public access, strengthen cybersecurity, and reduce long-term costs.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Free to humans possibly.

there was a website for this

https://courtwatch.us/

I actually approve of the something closer to the status quo here. Court filings contain a lot of sensitive information about the litigants.

It is one thing for the records to be publicly available, as they must be. It is a very different thing for every speck of material in them to be instantly available to anyone, anywhere, worldwide, for any purpose.