Intellectual Property Law

Federal Courts Wary of Document-Sharing Plugin

By Ryan Singel

The federal court system doesn’t seem to like Harlan Yu and his fellow merry pranksters who made a tool to free court documents from an unwieldy computer system that has a nasty habit of charging 8 cents a page for public documents.

In fact, the court system’s IT managers is warning that their browser plug-in might put sealed court documents at risk, when in actuality, the system doesn’t work at all when lawyers are uploading documents.

Yu, a Princeton University computer science graduate student, helped code RECAP, a Firefox-only plugin that helps lawyers who use the PACER system, the government’s antiquated computer system for federal court records. With the plugin installed, the user’s browser uploads whatever documents a user looks at in PACER to an online repository hosted by the Internet Archive.

Then when the next person using RECAP searches for that file, RECAP grabs the copy, sparing the user the cost for the document.

Federal judiciary spokesman Dick Carelli says the courts are reserving judgement until they’ve had more time to study the plug-in. But that hasn’t stopped warning emails and warning notices to PACER users that spread a bit of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

The court would like to make CM/ECF filers aware of certain security concerns relating to a software application or ?plug-in? called RECAP, [...] At this time, RECAP does not appear to provide users with access to restricted or sealed documents.

Please be aware that RECAP is “open-source” software, which can be freely obtained by anyone with Internet access and modified for benign or malicious purposes, such as facilitating unauthorized access to restricted or sealed documents. Accordingly, CM/ECF filers are reminded to be diligent about their computer security practices to ensure that documents are not inadvertently shared or compromised.

The emails also warn that any user who gets a fee waiver from a judge shouldn’t use RECAP since the waiver comes with the requirement that you not share the public records with anyone.

Yu tactfully says that the techs are “justifiably worried about the possibility of recap uploading sealed court documents to the database,” but quickly explains that’s not possible because the plug-in doesn’t work on CM/ECF — which is the system attorneys use to upload briefs and look at other documents in a given case.

The federal court has been resistant to technical change and calls to openness, saying the PACER system is quite useful as it is and the charges are necessary.

In September 2008, it shut down the few free terminals it had placed in about 12 libraries around the country after it discovered that open gov hacker Aaron Swartz used the and downloaded gigs upon gigs of court documents. They then reported it to the FBI, which then called in Carl Malamud, the net’s foremost open government advocate, for questioning since Swartz dumped the documents into Malamud’s free archive.

In addition to its high fees, PACER saddles users with an interface designed in the days when computers with monochrome screens.

RECAP, which is building on the work of Justia.com and Malamud, wants to create an open PACER. They’ve already had 6,000 downloads of their plugin, new documents are coming in regularly, and soon the system will have 2 million PDFs and about 1TB worth of data.

Users without a Pacer account can get at the freed court documents through the Internet Archive, but for now, the project isn’t letting search engines index the data.

That’s in part because lawyers and the courts haven’t done a good job of blacking out social security numbers from bankruptcy filings, and because opening up the records to the net’s search engines would make public what was previously obscured, if only behind the flimsiest of paywalls.

As for not getting a stronger response from the feds?

Yu says he’s happy the feds haven’t gone overboard with their response.

“We don?t want to get into any legal trouble and we don?t believe we are doing anything illegal,” Yu said. “The bottom line is these documents are public records.”

See Also:

• Firefox Plug-In Frees Court Records, Threatens Judiciary Profits …
• Online Rebel Publishes Millions of Dollars in U.S. Court Records …
• Lieberman Asks, Why Are Court Docs Still Behind Paid Firewall …
• Rogue Archivist Campaigns to Be Obama’s Printer
• Death to Sleepy Stock Data

Full post as published by Threat Level on August 25, 2009 (boomark / email).