[tomprince]

While, won't argue that Lexis-Nexis and West Law provide a value-add, in addition to the raw data, I have the impression that the raw data isn't easily available elsewhere. So, even if all you want is the raw data, you still need to pay them for access.

[mpyne]

Or you could do what they did and find the free source data and correctly scan it in yourself. If the data is easy to find then Lexis and West aren't gateways. If the data is hard to find then why should they do the hard work of finding it and then give away the more-useful version for free?

[_delirium]

The argument isn't that they should, but that the government should: we should have easy, free access to the laws that we're required to follow. If a court construes a criminal statute in a certain way that's surprising to me, the fact that I was ignorant of the court's decision isn't a defense, which effectively makes the decision part of the law I need to know and follow.

[mpyne]

This may seem weird but the government can't do it for free either. Do you think PACER (or something like it) would run itself with no resource investment whatsoever?

If the government pays for it, it comes via taxes (which are very difficult to adjust as needed), debt (which is undesirable in general), or by levying duties on those affected (which is essentially the PACER model).

The laws themselves can be found online (Gov't Printing Office, the Library of Congress's THOMAS, even the House of Representative has a legal code lookup website).

If you're referring to case law, there's already not a lot you can do without having a lawyer interpret what it means for you in your specific situation, and your lawyer should already have access to the case law.

I feel I should have the right to be able to drive my car as long as I prove I know the driving laws, but the government sure as shit made me pay for my updated driver's license last year. I pay for road maintenance every time I fill up my tank, but that gets washed into the whole transaction and so there's comparatively little outrage.

[DannyBee]

"This may seem weird but the government can't do it for free either. Do you think PACER (or something like it) would run itself with no resource investment whatsoever?"

PACER often runs revenues near 100 million. I'd do it at-cost. They are supposed to be doing it at cost.

"The laws themselves can be found online (Gov't Printing Office, the Library of Congress's THOMAS, even the House of Representative has a legal code lookup website)."

THOMAS is often quite slow in publishing. Often slow enough to be useless if you wanted to get info about a current bill. Their XML format is missing useful info in a lot of cases, like "dates", despite it being in the schema (I even know why, but i'll save that for a Daily WTF episode some day).

For example, the floor amendments to "Obamacare" were not on THOMAS until many months after the bill had been passed.

GPO still wants to charge for a lot of the data.

FWIW: As someone who delves into these systems a lot: The whole lot of them are built to look, to a casual outsider, like they provide good, timely information.

To anyone who actually has tried to get this data from them: they don't.

Even govtrack, which is what people really use to get bill info because of the above, scrapes HTML pages and assembles data from multiple sources, because the single sources that are supposed to be providing it, don't.

[_delirium]

I guess I don't see the difficulty in funding it via taxes, like the court system in general. To run a court system, we need to maintain buildings, pay judges' salaries, pay public defenders' salaries, pay bailiffs' salaries, store paper documents, hire stenographers, hire janitorial staff, and all sorts of other things. In the 21st century, storing and making available some PDFs is just another routine part of a functioning, transparent court system, and not even one of the more expensive parts.

[mpyne]

We can't even fund things we all agree that we need via taxes at this point, like paying down the national debt. Right now the government budget is zero-sum, and this has been true for some years now.

If you want something you get rid of something else, and while I'm sure there's many things we could find to pay for PACER from appropriated funds, the problem is getting enough of Congress to agree on that, and getting Congress to take the issue up at all (because given that PACER is already funded, changing the funding source really isn't a very important issue for them).