Thread by @doctorow

One of the quiet, grotesque, longrunning scandals of the US legal system is PACER, the paywall that separates the people of America from their court records. It's a hard drive of non-searchable PDFs, and it costs Americans $150m+/year to run.

pluralistic.net/2020/08/08/tur…

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After decades of fights - including the stunt that put @aaronsw in the FBI's crosshairs - Congress is finally moving on the Open Courts Act, which makes substantial reforms to the PACER system.

congress.gov/bill/116th-con…

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But as @carlmalamud - who has been a leader in the fight to free PACER - writes in an open letter to the bill's Congressional and Senate advocates, the Act doesn't go nearly far enough.

law.resource.org/pub/us/cfr/reg…

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The law is free as in speech - in the public domain, owned by no one. PACER should be a system for distributing whole copies of all US law to anyone who wants to host them (and it should be free for anyone who wants to confirm a copy's veracity).

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As Malamud points out, distributing copies of the PACER corpus takes some of the pressure off revisions to PACER itself. PACER is total flaming garbage and needs a complete overhaul. In recognition of this, the bill contemplates FIVE YEARS before major changes are due.

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But distributing copies of PACER - a mere 1b documents, peanuts compared to other open access projects - would enable public interest orgs to immediately build their own PACER mirrors to serve different audiences and use-cases.

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The letter has an impressive roster of signatories, from @EFF legal director @cmcsherr to @Wikipedia founder @jimmy_wales to @internetarchive founder @brewster_kahle to former CTOs of the USA, a former Chief Data Scientist of the USA, and more.

eof/