Legal Research

Malamud Takes on PACER

The New York Times has an interesting article about Carl Malamud's attempt to gather district court records from PACER and make they freely available on the Web.

Those courts, with the help of the Government Printing Office, had opened a free trial of Pacer at 17 libraries around the country. Mr. Malamud urged fellow activists to go to those libraries, download as many court documents as they could, and send them to him for republication on the Web, where Google could get to them.

Aaron Swartz, a 22-year-old Stanford dropout and entrepreneur who read Mr. Malamud's appeal, managed to download an estimated 20 percent of the entire database: 19,856,160 pages of text.

Then on Sept. 29, all of the free servers stopped serving. The government, it turns out, was not pleased.

A notice went out from the Government Printing Office that the free Pacer pilot program was suspended, "pending an evaluation." A couple of weeks later, a Government Printing Office official, Richard G. Davis, told librarians that "the security of the Pacer service was compromised. The F.B.I. is conducting an investigation."

It's not mentioned in the full article, but I assume that the documents were gathered through Public.Resource.org's PACER recycling center.

Thanks to my colleague, Howard Nash, for passing this article on.

Full post as published by WisBlawg - From the UW Law Library on February 13, 2009 (boomark / email).