Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/06/even-joe-fucking-lieberman.html
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The contemporary political ethos will be to privatize PACER, and give it to someone like Martin Shkreli to own.
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In other words, to return things to the way they were before PACER, when you had to pay the Westlaw monopoly for access to the law - including owing them royalties when you cited cases, because the page numbers in the court reporter books were claimed to be copyrighted. (italicized portion added, thanks to a correction from @simonize)
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Well they CLAIMED that they were copyrighted, despite Feist vs Rural Telephone. It was a long time before a court ruled against them.
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In 2006, PACER for the Bankruptcy Court serving my state (pop. 3.67 mil) ran on a 386 box with analog modems running Solaris. The price was fair then; but if the Administrative Office of the US Courts has moved the files to the cloud, costs will certainly have changed. However, courts were underfunded then, and unquestionably underfunded now. Where’s the money to run courts going to come from? The taxpayers through taxes, or the taxpayers through fees.
That bill that passed into law in the New Year, to put things online and make them accessible … does that have any effect on this?
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