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.

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

5 Comments

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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.
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..., 26 Aug 2009 @ 7:20pm

Re: That's what I thought...
phfffft
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Blatant Coward (profile), 26 Aug 2009 @ 10:00pm

To Recap
So Recap found a way to pay PACER for what it is "pirating"?
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Anonymous Coward, 27 Aug 2009 @ 6:41am

Re: To Recap
you forgot the sarcasm tag
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Peter Nielson (profile), 27 Aug 2009 @ 8:24am

Recap went down today... to many connections... maybe it's a good thing
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