Back in December, WIRED magazine did a piece about Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.org and his mission to make federal court records freely available on line, rather than exclusively through the court system’s own proprietary PACER network.   For anyone who has used PACER, the idea of a free, easy-to-use alternative has great appeal. The PACER system is not word searchable, so the only way to find documents is by entering the docket number or case name, two pieces of information that many researchers do not have when approaching a general legal question.  Also, PACER charges eight cents a page for materials other than court decisions, which actually generates a surplus for the courts – reportedly $50 million in 2006.  And PACER is not available to all curious Web users with the click of a mouse, but requires a government-issued password and login number.  
 
Working with Mr. Malamud, a number of government-reform activists have begun copying large amounts of material from PACER and placing them online without restriction. The New York Times of February 13 reports that one such activist, Aaron Schwartz, downloaded over 19 million pages of documents through a free PACER connection at a public library, an amount of text representing about 20% of the content on PACER.  (The free public library access was suspended on September 29 because of a reported security breach; it is unclear whether the mass downloading by activists such as Mr. Schwartz was at issue.)  More...