Forget Snow Days, Kids Get Two Days Of No Classes Due to A Computer Glitch

US Courts Now Say RECAP Is Fine

from the but-who-sent-out-those-letters? dept

Wed, Aug 26th 2009 4:41pm — Mike Masnick

Earlier this week, we wrote about how some Federal Courts were sending out misleading emails warning people about RECAP, the Firefox extension that would help make public domain PACER documents freely available. The warnings from the courts were scare tactics... but Paul Alan Levy spoke with Michel Ishakian, the Deputy Chief for IT Policy and Budget at the Administrative Office of the United States courts, who is apparently saying that the US courts are now perfectly fine with RECAP. That doesn't quite explain the scare tactic emails that have been sent out, but it's nice to know that (hopefully) the courts are coming around to see the value of RECAP. In fact, Ishakian apprently had a call with Ed Felten, who oversaw the RECAP project, and apparently everyone's on the same page. That's definitely good news.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: legal documents, pacer, public domain, recap

5 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Drew (profile), 26 Aug 2009 @ 6:27pm

That's what I thought...
When I read the original text in the first post on this it seemed to me that the court was just alerting user's of PACER to be aware of their security, asking the user's to ensure that they not install any specialized RECAP plugin not created by Felten which could be coded to send out confidential/sealed documents either to RECAP or another location. However I can easily see how some would see the words in a different light.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- ..., 26 Aug 2009 @ 7:20pm
  
  Re: That's what I thought...
  phfffft
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Blatant Coward (profile), 26 Aug 2009 @ 10:00pm

To Recap
So Recap found a way to pay PACER for what it is "pirating"?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 27 Aug 2009 @ 6:41am
  
  Re: To Recap
  you forgot the sarcasm tag
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Peter Nielson (profile), 27 Aug 2009 @ 8:24am

Recap went down today... to many connections... maybe it's a good thing
[ link to this | view in chronology ]