US Courts Administrative Office Sued Because PACER's Bad Math Is Overcharging Users

from the no-taxation-without-proper-pagination! dept

There's plenty to complain about when discussing the federal court's document filing system known as PACER. Lots.

The interface more closely resembles a low-effort Geocities page from 1998 than something with the weight of the federal government behind it.

Then there's the fact that PACER hands over PDFs like the pages are rolling off the Xerox. To access a digital file, you'll be paying $0.10 a page. Sure, it caps at $3.00 (30 pages) but that's only per individual PDF. Download another from the same case and you're back to square one, paying a dime a page. Opinions are free, which helps, but everything else steadily adds up.

That's not all. You also pay ten cents a "page" to access docket reports and lists of filed documents. Just searching for a case costs you money. Searches start with this bit of techno-wizardry:


If your search turns up nothing, that's $0.10. If it turns up five pages of possible cases, that's $0.50. And so on.

[And let's not forget we're paying for documents we paid judges to write, clerks to file and the Administrative Office of the US Courts to maintain. As for documents filed by attorneys, they're already paid for by clients -- or in cases where public defenders are doing the work, by taxpayers.]

But how does PACER determine what a "page" is when delivering something without a verifiable page count? PACER "explains" it this way:

Billable pages for docket reports, case reports, and search results are calculated using a formula based on the number of bytes extracted (4,320 bytes = 1 billable page).

Seems straightforward, although pretty much unverifiable by the end user. PACER spits out "pages" and puts a total at the bottom, and that's what gets billed to their accounts.

Bryndon Fisher says PACER's math is screwy. He dug into PACER's page calculations and, according to his class action lawsuit, it almost always adds its bytes up incorrectly. (via Courthouse News and Venkat Balasubramani)

Based on an extensive investigation into PACER’s billing practices, PACER exhibits a systemic error that overcharges users for accessing docket reports in violation of its stated policies and procedures.

The basic problem is simple. PACER claims to charge users $0.10 for each page in a docket report, up to a maximum charge of $3.00 per transaction. Since by default, these docket reports are displayed in HTML format, PACER uses a formula based on the number of bytes in a docket to determine the number of billable pages. One billable pages equals 4,320 extracted bytes.

In reality, however, the PACER billing system contains an error. PACER artificially inflates the number of bytes in each extracted page, counting some of those bytes five times instead of just once. As a result, users are systematically overcharged for certain docket reports.

Fisher says this error is resulting in overcharges for everyone using PACER. He tallied up his costs and found PACER's bad math caused a significant cost increase.

During the past two years, Fisher accessed 184 court docket reports using PACER and was charged and paid a total of $109.40 to the AO for this access. These charges do not include access to the individual PDF documents, only access to the docket reports.

Over this two-year period, based on the formula contained in the PACER User Manual, Fisher should have been charged $72.40, representing an overcharge of $37.00 or approximately 51%.

These are not insignificant costs. Fisher's total spend may seem low, but that's just counting access to search results and docket reports. (The real money is in PDFs). News agencies, lawyers and other heavy users are likely racking up significant overcharges if Fisher's calculations are accurate.

Fisher is suing the overseer of the PACER system -- the Administrative Office of the US Courts -- as well as its director (James C. Duff) and the United States itself. It's a class action suit, so other PACER account holders are presumably welcome to get in the action should his complaint be allowed to move forward. (Those who have sustained over $10,000 in overcharges are excluded from the class designation. $10,000 is the minimum amount of damages needed for a sole plaintiff to bring a federal claim.)

Now, the preferable solution to the problem (at least from our end) would be to eliminate PACER fees. That would eliminate calculation errors. That's probably never going to happen, no matter how many lawsuits to that effect are filed. But if Fisher is correct, the US government has collected a bunch of fees it didn't "earn."

Filed Under: administrative office, bryndon fisher, courts, overcharging, pacer

San Franciscans: Please Join Carl Malamud's Campaign To Help Free Up Court Documents

from the join-now dept

For many years, we've discussed various Carl Malamud projects to help make government information and documents more widely available (especially ones that are locked up for no good reason). One particular target of his is PACER, the court's electronic document system that is ridiculously cumbersome to use and costs an insane amount to use for even pretty mundane tasks. Earlier this year, we wrote about his National Day of PACER Protest, designed to be held on May 1st (this Friday). At the time, we suggested everyone sign up for a new PACER account (because, as if to demonstrate how stupid the PACER system is, you have to wait for the system to snail mail you your username and password before you can start using your account) to download a few documents on May 1st (PACER waives your fees if you download less than $15 in fees per quarter).

However, as we noted, this was just part of a three-pronged approach to convincing the courts to free up the PACER system. Another part was reaching out to judges to exempt certain courts and certain documents from PACER's charges. As part of that, Malamud is trying to send judges some beautiful postcards, and he's asking for people to help him do so. Here are just two of the postcards: If you're in San Francisco this Friday, May 1st, please try to make your way to the Internet Archive's headquarters at 300 Funston Avenue, where you can send a post card (or two, or six, or 60) to Chief Judge Sideny Thomas of the Ninth Circuit appeals court, asking him to free up access to PACER for several of the courts in the 9th circuit.

I am writing to you for help. If you are in San Francisco on Friday, May 1, from 8 AM to 5 PM, I'm hoping you can stop by the Internet Archive at 300 Funston Avenue.

May 1 is Law Day, and I'm asking people to come in and write a brief postcard about why you think that access to PACER is important. More specifically, you'll be writing a postcard to Chief Judge Thomas of the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in support of my request that the Court grant us free access to PACER for several courts in the Ninth Circuit. It would be a really big deal if the Court said yes, we're trying to show public support in a way the judges can relate to.

You can also go and send your postcard directly if you can't make it to the Internet Archive:

Clerk of the Court
Attn: Docket 15-80056
United States Courts of Appeals
James Browning Courthouse
95 7th Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

This is a worthwhile and fun project. If you're in San Francisco, please try to stop by. If you're not, please consider sending your own postcard.

Filed Under: 9th circuit, carl malamud, fees, freedom, pacer

Free Our Paywalled Court Documents: The Aaron Swartz Memorial PACER Cup Contest Announced

from the go-carl-go dept

Yesterday was the two year anniversary of Aaron Swartz's unfortunate suicide. Today, Carl Malamud, the leading champion of freeing up public documents and laws, has announced a National Day of PACER Protest, to be held on May 1st, with the "winner" (explained below) to get the Aaron Swartz Memorial PACER Cup. Malamud's discussion of this is pretty long, but well worth reading. If you don't recall, Malamud and Swartz have spoken out against PACER in the past many times (as have we). PACER, of course, is the horrific, antiquated paywall system by which the federal courts lock up tons of public documents and only make them available at 10 cents per page (with some exceptions). We rack up hefty PACER bills here at Techdirt all the time.

PACER, itself, is of dubious legality. The law that established PACER says that the fees collected can only be used for the system itself, yet the system is so profitable that the money flows back into other areas of the judicial system, and the Administrative Office of the US Courts doesn't want to give up on its cash cow. The system itself is painful to use -- slow with a horrible interface -- before we even get to the ridiculousness of 10 cents per page. A few years back, the courts tested letting certain libraries have free access to PACER, leading Aaron Swartz to stop by one of the libraries and set up a system to download a bunch of these documents. The Administrative Office called the FBI on him, though (of course) he hadn't actually broken any laws so he wasn't charged with anything. This also resulted in the "pilot program" being cut off and the libraries losing their free access.

Still the documents he did get out became the initial seed for the RECAP collection, available at the Internet Archive, which any PACER user can now add to using RECAP the law, a simple browser add-on that automatically uploads documents you view on PACER to the Internet Archive's collection.

Malamud describes a three-pronged strategy to knock down that PACER paywall, which he dubs the "red, white and blue" teams. The red team involves filing lawsuits challenging PACER's legality. The blue team, which Malamud will undertake himself, involves asking a bunch of courts for an exemption to PACER for some research that he's working on (and has been for some time, involving privacy issues related to PACER).

It's the white team approach that involves everyone else. One part of it is asking people to send notes to their local judges, just to inform them how totally screwed up PACER is (since many judges may not realize how much of a pain it is to the public). But the bigger part is that Malamud has proposed May 1st as a day when he wants lots and lots of people to use PACER accounts to download documents (and RECAP them). Here's where an important "caveat" in the $0.10 per page comes into play. If you rack up less than $15 of downloads in a quarter, PACER waives your fees. So Malamud is hoping that lots of people will sign up for PACER accounts and use May 1 to download cases right up to that line, so you won't have to pay.

On May 1, what if a lot of people all downloaded $15/worth of documents and perhaps even set a record day for amount of PACER usage?

Using your $15/quarter in “free” is an easy activity. You need to get a PACER account, then you need to get the RECAP extension for either Firefox or Chrome. Do this in the first quarter so you can casually and at your leisure make sure your setup is working. That way you know you’ll be set to go on May Day....

My hope is that groups will gather together and focus on a single district or circuit court. Law schools are a natural, it wouldn’t be hard to get a couple hundred law students at a school to all go after their local district. But, this doesn’t have to be limited to lawyers! For example, there’s a wonderful group called DC Legal Hackers which was started by Alan deLevie, Rebecca Wiliams, Jameson Dempsey, and other talented public-spirited people in Washington. Likewise, Chicago has an extremely active civic community and active groups such as the Smart Chicago Collaborative, founded by Daniel X. O’Neil. My hope is that some of these groups might get involved as well! (This memo is the first they will have heard of this, so I don't presume to task them with work, but only hope they will consider participation.)

In order to support the concepts of groups working together, I have made a small grant to the Free Law Project to add a simple “group name” field to your RECAP Extension preferences. They will furnish me a report on May Day showing each file and group name, so I can tally a total by district.

In other words, you can sign up for a "team" and Malamud will see which team helps free the most documents. And for the winner:

In order to stimulate a little friendly competition, we will monitor the RECAP logs on May 1 and for the group that uploads the most data for a single court we will award the Aaron Swartz Memorial PACER Cup, a handsome artifact suitable for display in your law school or civic venue trophy case. The next year, if PACER is still behind a paywall, we will rerun the competition and the new winner will get the cup. If and when the PACER paywall gets dropped, the last one holding the cup gets to keep it. We have commissioned Point.B Studio, who worked very closely with Aaron on projects for a decade, to design and implement the PACER Cup.

We strongly recommend taking part in this, though we also recommend that you sign up for PACER now, because it takes a bit of time. Make sure you have the hang of it now, in the first quarter (for less than $15 worth) before May 1st, so you're ready. Then get the RECAP extension for your preferred browser.

Oh, and feel free to put down "Techdirt" as your "group name" if you can't find a more worthy team to join...

Filed Under: aaron swartz, carl malamud, documents, downloads, pacer, paywall, public domain

Supreme Court To Dip Its Toes Cautiously Into The Electronic Age With Free Electronic Filing System

from the it's-a-step dept

The Supreme Court is notoriously technology averse. It still refuses to allow video recording of oral arguments, leading to things like John Oliver's inspired Supreme Court dog stock video footage. On New Year's Eve, Chief Justice John Roberts released his 2014 Year-End Report, which focuses mainly on the plans to finally offer an electronic filing system for the Supreme Court. Much of the report details the long history of the Supreme Court being way behind the times technologically (it even adopted the pneumatic tube way late) -- and why he thinks this late adopter strategy is the appropriate one to take. He discusses the existing CM/ECF (Case Management / Electronic Case Filing) system, as well as PACER, the tool by which the public can access many of those documents. However, these systems do not cover the Supreme Court. And while they are completely antiquated (and a total pain to use), the Supreme Court apparently recognizes that being even further behind than that is a mistake. So it will very, very, very cautiously dip its toes into the electronic filing / electronic document access world... sometime in 2016 (yes, 2016, not 2015).

The Supreme Court is currently developing its own electronic filing system, which may be operational as soon as 2016. Once the system is implemented, all filings at the Court—petitions and responses to petitions, merits briefs, and all other types of motions and applications—will be available to the legal community and the public without cost on the Court’s website. Initially, the official filing of documents will continue to be on paper for all parties in all cases, with the electronic submission an additional requirement for parties represented by attorneys. Once the system has operated effectively for some time and the Supreme Court Bar has become well acquainted with it, the Court expects that electronic filing will be the official means for all parties represented by counsel, but paper filings will still be required. Parties proceeding pro se will continue to submit documents only on paper, and Court personnel will scan and upload those documents to the system for public access. The Court will provide more information about the details of the system, including the process for attorneys to register as authorized filers, in the coming months.

First, it's great that the Supreme Court is offering this -- even if it's being very cautious in its approach. Second, it's doubly great that (unlike PACER) it will be free for the public to use. PACER should be that way as well, but the court system has become too fat and happy from the fees.

Now, if we can just convince them to let cameras into the damn courtroom so the public can actually see how the Supreme Court works. To that end, at least, it appears that Congress may be gearing up to step in and force the Supreme Court to bring in the cameras, with multiple people in Congress criticizing the Court for still holding out.

Filed Under: cameras in court, court, electronic filing, pacer, supreme court, technology, video in court

PACER Finally Agrees To Put Back Court Documents That Were Deleted

from the wasn't-so-hard,-was-it? dept

Sooner or later this had to happen. Back in August, with no warning, the PACER electronic court document system, overseen by the Administrative Office of the judicial system, announced that as part of an "upgrade" it had deleted a bunch of cases. Once this started getting some attention, officials gave a weak, nonsensical "explanation" for why no one could figure out how to take some PDFs and move them to the new system. As for why it couldn't work with many, many public-service oriented archivers -- who all offered to host the deleted works -- no answer was ever given. Recently, however, Congress started to ask questions, and then all of a sudden the Administrative Office decided to wake up to the fact that this was a bad idea. The missing documents will soon be back.

"The Administrative Office is working to restore electronic access to these cases by converting the docket sheets in these cases to PDF format which will allow us to make them available in PACER," said David Sellers, assistant director for public affairs at the AO, in a statement to the Washington Post. "This process will be completed in the four appellate courts by the end of October. We are also working to provide a similar solution for the dockets on the legacy system in the California Central bankruptcy court."

Of course, still nothing is being done to actually make the PACER system more accessible to the public and dumping the ridiculous 10 cents/per page fee the system charges (which almost certainly breaks the law). Maybe if Congress started asking questions about that travesty as well, we'd finally start to see some real improvements.

Filed Under: courts, documents, openness, pacer, transparency

Senator Leahy Asks Why The Federal Court System Dumped A Bunch Of Court Documents Down The PACER Memory Hole

from the bring-them-back dept

Last month, we were among the first to report that the federal court system's electronic document system, PACER, had deleted a bunch of cases. The folks who run PACER came back with a completely nonsensical defense of the move, claiming they were updating some systems and some of the documents were on older systems that weren't compatible. Of course, none of that explains why no one figured out how to move those documents to the more up-to-date system. Nor why PACER gave no prior notice of the deletion. Nor why it didn't even try to work with any one of the many, many public repositories of legal documents out there. Instead, the cases were just deleted from electronic existence.

Senator Patrick Leahy is now asking why.

Created over 25 years ago, PACER is home to millions of court documents that were previously accessible only by requesting them from the relevant court. This often involved a trip to the court clerk's office and cost considerable time and money. While PACER is not perfect, it provides a significant benefit to the public: at the stroke of a few keys, the public can now search for important briefs, court orders, written opinions, and other related filings, and receive the information instantaneously. Servicing over a million users in the last few years alone, PACER has not only dramatically improved access to information, it has helped increased transparency of the federal judiciary.

Wholesale removal of thousands of cases from PACER, particularly from four of our federal courts of appeals, will severely limit access to information not only for legal practitioners, but also for legal scholars, historians, journalists, and private litigants for whom PACER has become the go-to source for most court filings. It is additionally concerning that this announcement was made without any warning to the public, and without prior notification or consultation with Congress. Moreover, the announcement did not detail what steps, if any, are being taken to ensure that these important case files are properly preserved.

We live in a digital age. Requiring requesters to travel to the clerk's office of individual courts to retrieve actual documents, or to submit an email request and wait several days for a response, is a dramatic step backwards from the centralized system that PACER provides. Furthermore, it is reported that requests made by email to individual courts could incur a $30 to $60 processing fees--a troubling increase in costs compared to the 10 cents per page that is currently charged to retrieve documents from PACER. PACER was designed to provide easy and affordable access to all members of the public, not just those who have the time and resources to submit and numerous requests to the courts.

He concludes by noting that he urges the Administrative Office of the courts to "take immediate steps to restore access to these documents." Of course, it would be even better if they finally made PACER free and open to the public, but not deleting past cases would at least be a non-negative step.

Filed Under: court documents, memory hole, pacer, patrick leahy

PACER Officials Give Weak, Nonsensical Excuse For Why PACER Deleted Tons Of Public Court Records With No Notice

from the total-failure dept

We were among the first to report that the federal court system's PACER electronic database of court records had deleted a ton of old cases, and once our story went live, we saw a ton of lawyers, law professors and journalists flip out over the news, which had been hidden in a little-read notice on the PACER site, posted with basically no notice at all. The Washington Post got the Administrative Office of the US Courts to provide a statement about the deletions that makes almost no sense at all.

Charles Hall, a spokesperson for the Administrative Office, told The Post via e-mail that the change was made on Aug. 11 in preparation for an overhaul of the the PACER architecture, including the implementation of the next generation of the Judiciary's Case Management and Electronic Case Files System. "NextGen replaces the older CM/ECF system and provides improvements for users, including a single sign-on for PACER and NextGen," he wrote.

However, as a result of the changes the locally developed legacy case management systems of some courts were no longer compatible with PACER, he says. Since PACER works as a sort of distributed network of different archives rather than one centralized database, that's a major problem.

However, Hall says, the dockets and documents no longer available through the system could still be obtained directly from the relevant court and "all open cases, as well as any new filings, will continue to be available on PACER."

Yes, I can understand how there might be some backwards compatibility problems, but it seems like there's a pretty straightforward way to deal with that: move the old files to the new system. But no one seems to be doing that. The claim that it's okay because the documents are available "directly from the relevant court" is a ridiculous, weak excuse. The whole point of PACER was to make the records more accessible and to get away from having the documents only available to people who have the time and resources to go down to the local court to get the documents.

The Washington Post also spoke to Brian Carver from UC Berkeley's School of Information, who recently took over the management of RECAP (the crowd-sourced effort that many of us rely on and contribute to) to post any documents obtained via PACER to the freely available web via the Internet Archive. He made a pretty good point, that it's absolutely ridiculous that no one at the courts made this information public earlier so that people could try to do something to preserve the availability of those case records:

Carver says their group would be happy to host the files publicly, and are reaching out the courts to see if that is possible. But he was still shocked by the lack of advance warning. "If we had known about it in advance maybe we could have done something to target these documents and archive them publicly," he says. "It was really an announcement of an accomplished feat -- we weren't told until after this deed was already done."

Meanwhile, Aaron Greenspan, who runs another site that makes court documents publicly available, PlainSite, (and who first alerted us to this issue), has sent the Administrative Office of the US Courts a response to this, pointing out, as we mentioned above, how ridiculous it is:

The supposed explanation that the dockets and documents were stored in an "incompatible" format is nonsensical and has no technical justification whatsoever. As you well know, database schema changes happen all the time, and it is easily within the realm of possibility to write conversion scripts—especially given how much money the AO has spent on PACER NextGen already. In fact, the technology known as ODBC exists for this very reason.

He further has offered to "reverse-engineer the supposedly legacy format(s) ourselves and make the data available to the public for free at no cost to the Government" and even asked them to ship the hard drives to him. Somehow, I doubt that's going to happen, but it seems like working with Carver or Greenspan or anyone else, frankly, would have made more sense than just deleting these public records.

Update: And... Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org has sent letters to all of the courts that had cases deleted, requesting copies of the deleted cases. We'll see how that goes.

While it's great that PACER is apparently moving to a new system (the login page is already different, though the underlying pages still remain horrifyingly painful to use), dumping a bunch of cases down the memory hole is a huge problem.

Filed Under: administrative office, court records, courts, pacer, public records, recap
Companies: plainsite

PACER Deleting Old Cases; Time To Fix PACER

from the down-the-memory-hole dept

For years, we've talked about the many problems with PACER, the horribly designed and managed electronic court records system that the federal court system uses here in the US. Beyond being clunky, buggy, horribly designed and slow -- it's also expensive. With some exceptions, it's 10 cents per page you download, and also 10 cents per search. As many have noted, this almost certainly violates the law concerning PACER, which says that the Judicial Conference can only "prescribe reasonable fees… to reimburse expenses incurred in providing these services." And yet the fees go way, way beyond what's needed to maintain the (again, horrible) system which they refuse to update. Instead, it's used for lots of other things. And, as many people note, it's something of a travesty that all of these public records are locked up, rather than being made available. Even more ridiculous is that when people hack around this system, such as with the open RECAP project to free up PACER documents, courts freak out. Or, when people like Aaron Swartz try to use free access to PACER to free up its documents, they end up being the subject of an FBI investigation for computer hacking.

Aaron Greenspan, who runs an open court records site called Plainsite (and who is currently engaged in an unlikely-to-succeed lawsuit arguing that PACER should be free), has noticed that PACER is also shoving old cases down the memory hole so they will no longer be available. In a brief announcement on August 10th, PACER's website announced that a bunch of cases would "no longer be available." Now, there have always been some cases not on PACER, but to actively start removing a bunch of cases, including many that are fairly recent (CAFC cases from just two years ago?!?) seems ridiculous and excessive. Yes, PACER is horribly designed and managed, but it's not like the storage costs for some old PDFs is that high. Especially as storage keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. Does someone down at the Administrative Office of the US Courts want me to send them an external 2 TB hard drive? They run about $100 these days...

Filed Under: aaron greenspan, cases, pacer, public records, records
Companies: plainsite

John Steele Keeps Playing Games With Judge Wright

from the probably-not-a-good-idea dept

When your credibility is already in serious question in a courtroom situation, in part because of a long series of games you played with the court, where the court has made it clear that it believes those games were intended to fraudulently deceive the court, anyone with a few brain cells would recognize that it's probably best not to continue playing games with that court. But, then there's John Steele. Steele appears to be unable to resist trying to play more games with Judge Wright's court. The latest is that, back on Tuesday July 2nd, Judge Wright had scheduled a hearing for Friday July 12th in the Prenda case. John Steele has continued to pretend that he is unaware of filings in the case -- a somewhat unbelievable stance and which, if true, would only suggest that Steele himself failed to abide by court rules that require him to provide an updated email address, which would be an acceptable means of service. The rules are pretty clear: However, Steele filed a motion on July 8th, claiming that he had only just heard about the hearing on July 12th, saying it was delivered by mail, and claiming that it would be impossible for him to attend the hearing in person.

On July 2, 2013, the Court issued a notice (ECF No. 200) scheduling a hearing for July 12, 2013, on the undersigned's motion for reconsideration. The undersigned resides in Florida and just received notice on July 8, 2013 via U.S. Mail. The undersigned has a previously scheduled family matter that prohibits his in-person attendance at the July 12, 2013 hearing. Further, nine days' notice--over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, in particular--is a prohibitively narrow window of time for to receive notice of a hearing via U.S. Mail, and schedule travel arrangements to appear cross-country. Finally, attending a hearing in California is an extremely expensive proposition as it requires plane fare, a hotel room and other incidental expenses.

Of course, as noted above, the court's rules have already made it clear that electronic notification is sufficient here, and Steele therefore should have received notice on the 2nd, not the 8th, and if he did not, it would be his own fault for not having the correct information in the system (and, honestly, does anyone actually believe that Steele is not paying attention to the details of this case, when he's been shown to pay very close attention in the past?).

Separately, the "oh it's so expensive" excuse is somewhat amusing, considering this is the same Steele who has claimed to have made millions from copyright trolling, and bragged to his critics about how he's about to go buy an expensive luxury sports car (with list prices around $100,000) with all the money he's making. That was just a few months ago. Seems fairly incredible to plead poverty months later...

It shouldn't be that surprising, then, to see that Judge Wright denied Steele's request very quickly, while also noting that Steele appears to have lied in his motion. In the original motion, Steele claimed that a Court clerk told him that he "would have to file a motion if he wished to participate in the hearing telephonically." However, in the denial of the request, Wright notes: "Mr. Steele was advised by telephone on July 8, 2013 by the clerk, that his request for a telephonic appearance regarding his motion set July 12th is denied, and did NOT advise him to file such motion as stated in his motion."

So after already being told such a request was denied, Steele files the motion claiming that the clerk told him to file a motion, which the clerk did not. Did Steele not think that the clerk would talk to Judge Wright? So, what are the odds that Steele actually shows up on Friday?

Filed Under: ecf, john steele, otis wright, pacer, service
Companies: prenda, prenda law

Two $5,000 RECAP Grants Given Out In Memory Of Aaron Swartz For Improvements In RECAP

from the finally! dept

Back in January, we had mentioned that Aaron Greenspan had offered up three $5,000 grants in memory of Aaron Swartz, for certain key improvements to RECAP, the browser extension that automatically uploads PACER documents to the Internet Archive, making them publicly available. The Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton -- where RECAP was initially developed -- and Greenspan have now announced that two grants have been awarded: one for creating a Chrome browser RECAP plugin and another for extending the capability to work with the appellate courts as well. While it's cool that these grants have been given out, it's even cooler that RECAP is now available for Chrome. If you're a PACER user and a Chrome user, go get the plugin now...

Filed Under: chrome, grants, legal documents, pacer, recap