[rayiner]

None. He was distributing copyrighted articles from JSTOR. These are court cases which legally cannot be copyrighted (with any copyrighted annotations in the paper copies properly redacted). The two situations have nothing in common.

[bpchaps]

Heh. And yet case.law has a 500 case download limit except those who have been approved by research agreements that are mandatory by lexis nexis. I've been waiting since release night to get a research license approved. Granted, it's been less than a week.

What do you think would happen if somebody with a research agreement downloaded everything and released it all to the public? You'd probably then find that the two situations are very similar.

[rayiner]

To be clear, the download limit is imposed by Ravel, the startup that paid for the effort of redacting copyrighted annotations from the scanned images. Lexis later purchased Ravel, but the download limit comes from Ravel’s control over the redacted digitized images, not Lexis’s copyright over the source materials.

Now, what would happen if you breached the research agreement? You’d probably be sued for breach of contract. But that’s not what case.law is doing. It’s abiding by everyone’s legal rights: the original publishers who collected, archived, indexed, and added annotations to the case law, and the folks who helped digitize versions that could be freely distributed. The government paid for the courts so the cases are free, but it didn’t pay for all those other things and they aren’t free.

[pc86]

That's pretty tautological, isn't it?

> If someone did a very similar thing here to what Swartz did with JSTOR, this situation would then be very similar to what Swartz did with JSTOR.

[gnode]

No, the question is asking whether a similar act would result in a similar outcome; whether there is a crucial difference in how the two perceptibly similar things would interact with law.

Analogously, one could ask what would happen if someone avoided their taxes vs. evaded their taxes. Both could be seen as morally the same act, but the legal consequences are different.

[Mononokay]

Swartz did work with PACER before the JSTOR incident. His first incident with an FBI agent was because of the work he did with PACER.

[rayiner]

The FBI invesitated and then did nothing, which was the right course of action. PACER is a government database intended mainly for litigants and the courts. It is essential to the functioning of the court system,[1] and it was proper for the FBI to investigate any unusual access. It was also proper when the FBI declined to press any charges after they concluded that all he was doing was distributing the documents, which were public and not subject to copyright.

[1] PACER is literally a read-only view into the same databases courts and lawyers use to file documents and orders in cases. Some people want a mass-publishing system for court documents, and maybe we should build such a thing. But calls to abuse PACER for that purpose are just an end-run around the political challenges of getting the government to spend public money building such a system.

[akvadrako]

> Some people want a mass-publishing system for court documents, and maybe we should build such a thing.

If I understand you correctly there is such a thing. https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/ is a public archive populated by browser plugins by paid PACER users.

[rayiner]

RECAP is a hack and depends on someone to have accessed the document in the first instance. It's not true public access.

The issue is that PACER is designed primarily for attorneys. That's why the usage fees are so high--it's a basically a tax on attorneys that goes to funding the operations of the courts. (Pro se individuals are entitled to receive filings in their cases for free.)

The open access folks have a legitimate point that PACER makes it hard for the public to access those same documents. But the solution to that isn't to abuse PACER. If we think everyone should have free access to these documents,[1] the solution is to build a website where these things are published. And, since that would undercut the value of PACER, arrangements would have to be made to replace that revenue with general appropriations.

[1] Note the reason we would want to do this is that these are public records, not because they constitute "the law." Court opinions with precedential value are already published on courts' websites in PDF format. What PACER contains is everything else.

[ndnxhs]

From what I understood he only downloaded docs he had access too but did not distribute them.