Friends of ELI Should Get Their Own PACER account

[Matthew Chan]

Oscar and I mentioned this in our Christmas Eve edition of the ELI Video Update.  I am officially making the recommendation that Friends of ELI sign up for their own free account to get access to PACER.

I am making the request for two reasons: 1.) it allows the members of ELI community more direct access to court documents 2.) more members can search and extract valuable documents than Oscar and I can possibly think of.

Downloaded PACER documents can generally be posted anywhere for reporting and sharing purposes without concern because they are in the public domain.

To quote http://pacer.gov:

"Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) is an electronic public access service that allows users to obtain case and docket information from federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts, and the PACER Case Locator via the Internet. PACER is provided by the federal Judiciary in keeping with its commitment to providing public access to court information via a centralized service."

It costs nothing to sign up but it allows you access to the world of federal court documents.

To quote Pacer.gov regarding costs AFTER signing up the account:

"Access to court documents costs $0.08 per page. The cost to access a single document is capped at $2.40, the equivalent of 30 pages. The cap does not apply to name searches, reports that are not case-specific and transcripts of federal court proceedings.

By Judicial Conference policy, if your usage does not exceed $10 in a quarter, fees for that quarter are waived, effectively making the service free for most users."

If there are relevant documents important to the ELI community (such as the HAN lawsuits), we would be willing and able to upload them to our official account in Scribd.com.

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

excellent idea, more tools is always a good thing. One item I did notice in their policy is:

"The per-page charge applies to the number of pages that results from any search, regardless of the number of pages viewed, printed, or downloaded. Searches that result in no matches incur a charge for one page of data."

In other words perform your searches carefully..

[SoylentGreen]

While folks are surfing PACER, they should check into what happened with Riddick/Bernina.
Then post it on Scribd. lol.

Here's a story about how some clever people downloaded tons of PACER documents during a free trial:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/case-against-pacer.ars

They've posted their booty online too:
http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/pacer/

S.G.

[rachelsmith]

Speaking of PACER, you can obtain the case dockets free of charge and without a pacer account at http://FreeCourtDockets.com. Please note that, whatever you download will be indexed by google. Expect to see lot of ads also.

[Matthew Chan]

To minimize the PACER fees, it is best to determine what documents you need/want through Google first before going into PACER.  PACER is not where you want to do casual searches obviously.  But good info people are digging out.

[Oscar Michelen]

Just want to add that PACER does not charge 8 cents a page to view Federal Court decisions. Those are completely free of charge.