During its biannual meeting in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, the Judicial Conference of the United States approved several changes in the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, according to a news release.

PACER provides online access to federal court records.

(PACER)

Federal courts will now be able to make digital audio recordings of court hearings available through PACER for $2.40 per file. The move follows a two-year pilot project. Previously, individuals could obtain audio only via a CD recording from a court clerk’s office for $26.

The Judicial Conference also approved adjusting the fee schedule from an annual billing cycle to a quarterly billing cycle. Because users are not billed unless they accrue more than $10 in charges during the billing cycle, the change will increase the amount of data available to an individual before they face a bill. In fiscal 2009, about 153,000 PACER account holders — nearly half of all active accounts — did not receive a bill, according to the release. If the quarterly billing cycle had been in effect, an additional 85,000 accounts would not have received bills, or about a total of 75 percent of all active accounts.

The Judicial Conference also approved a pilot program in as many as 12 courts to publish federal district and bankruptcy court opinions via the Government Printing Office’s Federal Digital System (FDsys).

The Judicial Conference is the policy-making body for the federal court system.

Carl Malamud (Joichi Ito)

As part of his campaign to make federal court records more readily available and searchable on the Internet, open-government activist Carl Malamud has released information about the costs of the PACER system to the Department of Justice.

The Justice Department has spent about $4 million this year on the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, better known as PACER, according to Malamud, Wired.com reports. Malamud of Public.Resource.org told the Web news publication that  he obtained this information from a Freedom of Information Act request regarding how much money the department spends on public information.

While most PACER users pay 8 cents per page or a maximum of $2.40 per document, DOJ has an annual contract with PACER. According to the documents obtained by Malamud, the most recent contracts have been for:

• $800,000 for fiscal 2003.
• More than $2 million for fiscal 2004.
• More than $2.6 million for fiscal 2005.
• More than $3 million for fiscal 2006.
• More than $3.8 million for fiscal 2007.
• More than $3.7 million for fiscal 2008.
• More than $4.1 million for fiscal 2009.
• More than $3.9 million in fiscal 2010.

Malamud for years has been on a crusade to make public and increase accessibility to public domain information from government agencies. To date he has been successful at getting the Securities and Exchange Commission to put its EDGAR database online.

Almost four years ago, Malamud took up a new effort, increasing public accessibility to PACER. For people interested in accessing court documents, PACER is the first, and in many cases, the last step.

Using the PACER Web site requires registering with a credit card, which Malamud says is restricting access to public records. “They’re public if you have a credit card,” Malamud told us in October, noting that the requirement prevents some people, especially low-income people, from accessing these public records. “I’m just not convinced that anyone who wants it has sufficient access.” Another drawback is the registration requirement, including name and contact information, which is “intimidating” according to Malamud.

PACER records used to be accessible at 17 public libraries nationwide — until Malamud encouraged people to download as many documents as they could and send them to him for posting on his Web site, which search engines can access. In response, Aaron Swartz downloaded about 20 percent of the PACER database to turn over to Malamud’s Web site.

This prompted the Government Printing Office, which had arranged for the library access, and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to shut down the service “pending an evaluation.� Soon after a FBI investigation was launched.  Malamud maintains that he did nothing illegal.

Malamud’s solution to the perceived problems with PACER is to make all court records accessible and more easily searchable. “There are three reasons we do this: democracy, innovation and efficiency,” Malamud said.

As PACER is currently configured,  a user cannot search by a word or phrase, only by a party name or case number. Malamud points out that if  all court documents were searchable in search engines, such as Google, people would be able to search more broadly — using a phrase or name that isn’t part of the official name of the case, for example.

There is a concern though about possible unintended consequences of such a searchable database. Judges are aware that court documents, unless sealed, are public and accessible through a number of venues — including PACER and Lexis — but having legal documents searchable in popular, publicly accessible search engines  could prompt judges to redact more information.

“Judges may change the way they do things and that might be a good thing,” Malamud said, adding that judges should be making their decisions on redacting information based on the fact that information is public and should not qualify how public the information is.

As part of his long-running quest to make public court documents more accessible to the general public, Malamud is critical of the amount of money — coming from both taxpayers and individual customers — is spent on PACER. According to Dick Carelli, spokesman for the AOUSC, PACER’s revenue in fiscal year 2009 was $89 million. “They’re making a big profit on this and they’re not supposed to.” If PACER documents were all public, it could eventually save the government $1 billion, Wired.com reports.

In addition, DOJ pays legal publisher West Publishing for online access to Supreme Court opinions, tax courts records, appeals court decisions and bankruptcy court, according to Wired.com. The department paid the company $5 million in 2005.

AOUSC defends the PACER system and its annual revenue. Carelli said most PACER users do not pay for the service, as PACER waives the fees for anyone who spends less than $10 annually.

CORRECTION: A previous version of the story said Malamud estimated PACER’s annual revenue to be $220 million. This version also clarifies that the PACER pilot program was shut down by both entities, not just the Government Printing Office. Also, the program was shut down in response to actions by Swartz, not by Malamud’s call for action.

The Administrative Office of the United States Courts is looking for feedback on the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, better known as PACER, The Blog of Legal Times reported today.

Administrative Office spokesperson Richard Carelli told The BLT that users can give their input on all aspects of the 21-year-old Web portal that charges a fee to access court documents.

The service has started to face competition from RECAP, a free court records retrieval system. PACER offered its service for free in September 2008, but unexpectedly ended the trial program after the FBI said PACER was “compromised,” according to The BLT. RECAP was using the free access to retrieve thousands of records at the time, The BLT said.

In an effort to increase transparency, The Judicial Conference has voted to make internet lists of all civil and criminal cases include a case number and a generic name (ex. “Sealed vs. Sealed”), for every sealed case.  These lists will be accessible through PACER and will make it easier for journalists as well as the general public to figure out which cases are sealed. Read the U.S. Courts news annoucement here.

A group of open-government activists is trying to make federal court records searchable on the Web, the New York Times reports. The activists say Pacer, the government-run database of court records and dockets, is antiquated and charges too much. Pacer is short for Public Access to Court Electronics Records system.

Personally, I love Pacer. It’s reasonably cheap (8 cents a page), fast and reliable. It could have a better search function. But the activists, I fear, will just end up making the U.S. court system less open. If all these sometimes sensitive court records are just thrown up and available to anyone to browse through a Google search engines, judges will be much quicker to grant motions to seal. And there is already too much sealing of public court records now. If you’re interested in big cases that affect public policy, you can already pretty much Google those briefs, because someone usually has posted them.

Last year, Carl Malamud of the group Public.Resource.org urged fellow open-government activists to use a free Pacer progam at public libraries to download federal court records to post on the Web.  Says the Times:

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.�