[anon373839]

Because “publicly available with some friction” has a fundamentally different character than “indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers”. That type of information access wasn't even fathomable when the concept of public records was born. It enables a lot of uses where I would argue that the harms outweigh the benefits.

[District5524]

Just trying to remind people that in most countries outside the US, there is nothing like PACER. Even in the UK, it's usually just judgments that are freely available, see https://www.bailii.org/ and https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/. Even with the recent expected extension of "Public Documents", accessing the claim form or other statements of cases will depend on the court making an order https://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/procedure-rules/civil/rule....

And for non-common law jurisdictions, even the UK level of publicity of judgments is rarely available - anonymisation is a prerequisite: https://homoki.net/en/2024/02/01/On_Anonymisation_of_court_d...

So, for many countries, it's not just that sealed documents are not accessible, many people in traditional democracies couldn't imagine and bear this level of publicity for every court document like you have in the US.

[runako]

> indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers

Any fee that is acceptable for "normal use" is not high enough to deter the likes of Google or the big AI developers.

Google, a company that custom develops specialized automobiles to regularly drive ~all the streets in the world for the purposes of having imagery for a mapping app. Google, a company that (before it even got really rich), developed custom book-scanning technology to scan all the books it could acquire.

The big AI providers are in litigation now because even licensing terms that prevent use are no deterrent, they just stole the content they wanted to train their models.

The fee won't deter the cases you want, it will only harm the rest of us.

[jasonfarnon]

"Because “publicly available with some friction” has a fundamentally different character than “indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers”"

people have already forgotten the lessons of all those mugshots websites.

[fellowniusmonk]

Yeah, I think this is a bad take on the part of the EFF.

The full dataset will be in private hands and available everywhere to everyone to do anything the moment this goes live.

I protect data for a living, cost asymmetry and proof of work are really the only tools we have.

If this goes live, the next time I get subpoenaed to testify for something I'm going to throw in so many random but couched accusations at people just to screw them over when the data goes live at scale via data brokers and torrent dumps.

Bill Jones (accused in court testimony of killing puppies) is requesting the HOA get off of his back.

[Zak]

I see a valid point here, however, some court rulings create binding precedents. As I understand it, those can be paywalled in PACER. Binding precedents are part of the law everyone within the relevant jurisdiction is required to obey, and it is unjust for any part of the law to not be freely available.

It may be reasonable to put limits on free public access to records where there's a privacy concern.

[eurleif]

At least within the federal court system, binding precedent is already freely available. Only circuit courts and SCOTUS can create binding precedent, and the opinions of those courts are freely available on their respective sites, outside of PACER. E.g., here's the 9th circuit: https://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/decisions/opinions/

[Zak]

That's good to know. I did not know circuit court opinions were always available.

The current system still doesn't sit right with me. Someone sufficiently wealthy has effectively unlimited access. Someone sufficiently poor with a lot of time on their hands might also have unlimited access. Everyone in the middle has a bottleneck.