[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.