The Internet Archive has deep experience with

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The stated purpose of PACER is to make public court records “freely available to the greatest extent possible.” Sixteen years ago, the United States Courts predicted that PACER would allow the public to “surf to the courthouse door on the Internet.” Today, anyone visiting a federal courthouse can view the public record for free. PACER, on the other hand, charges users per-page fees that are prohibitive for many members of the public. The Judiciary could resolve this unfortunate discrepancy—immediately—at no cost. This is our offer.

collections of this kind. In fact, we already host the records from over a million federal court cases that have been donated by the public as part of the RECAP Project. However, a million cases is a small telegram data portion of the hundreds of millions of cases that PACER contains, and we are frustrated that it is so difficult to obtain and serve the workings of our federal courts to the public. This is a fairly trivial technical task, and we would welcome the opportunity to make much more data available.

I must also note that the Internet Archive is not alone in being well-equipped to offer this service. There are other large digital repositories that similarly serve the public for free. I cannot speak for them, but I believe that once the corpus is available for no fee and without restriction, they too will replicate it and offer similar service. Indeed, others may build useful tools for reading, searching, and studying the corpus of public court records that makes up our federal case law.

In order to recognize the vision of universal free access to public court records, the Federal Judiciary would essentially have to do nothing. We are experts at “crawling” online databases in an efficient and careful fashion that does not burden those systems. We are already able to comprehensively crawl PACER from a technical perspective, but the resulting fees would be astronomical. The Federal Judiciary has a Memorandum of Understanding with both the Executive Office for US Trustees and with the Government Printing Office that gives each entity no-fee access for the public benefit. The collection we would provide to the public would be far more comprehensive than the GPO’s current court opinion program—although I must laud that program for providing a digitally-authenticated collection of many opinions.

By making federal judicial dockets available in this manner, the Federal Judiciary would enable free and unlimited public access to all records that exist in PACER, finally living up to the name of the program. In today’s world, public access means access on the Internet. Public access also means that people can work with big data without having to pass a cash register for each document.

This PACER collection we would maintain and improve would have far more detailed metadata and contextual information than the GPO service or the PACER Case Locator service. And, that’s just for starters, because we know that there are thousands of eager researchers, journalists, and government workers (including Congressional staff) who would immediately jump in and work with us.

By providing no-cost access to the Internet Archive to PACER and accepting our commitment to make this information available for use without restriction in perpetuity, we believe we can work with our government to make the workings of our court more usable to government attorneys, to members of the bar, and to the public at large.