Documents produced by the government are not copyrighted; they’re in the public domain. So it should be easy to get any document in federal court. But it’s not.
The federal government uses an old-school electronic system called Pacer to provide access to rulings, briefs and other documents. Pacer isn’t easy to use and it charges 8 cents per page for download — which adds up if you’re getting big documents. (Pacer currently runs a huge budget surplus.)
So in comes Aaron Swartz: He used a free trial of Pacer to download 19 million pages, John Schwartz reports—that’s about 20 percent of the database. Swartz and his pals aim to make it all free.
They ran into a hurdle—when the courts figured out what Swartz was doing, they got spooked and shut down the free-trial service (citing a security breach). But it seems only a matter of time till they everything’s opened up.
