The Internet Archive Offers to Host PACER Data and Make it All Available For Free

UPDATED: Prepared Testimony of Professor Thomas Bruce, Director, Cornell Legal Information Institute and Others at Feb. 14, 2017 U.S. House Judiciary Committee. Intellectual Property, and the Internet Subcommittee.
UPDATED: Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard U. Law Library) Statement for the Record on Access to Legal Information (via Et. Seq/Harvard Law Library Blog)
From VentureBeat:

Back in 2010, the Internet Archive launched RECAP (“PACER” in reverse) in collaboration with Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Through RECAP, anyone can upload PACER documents they’ve purchased and make them available to others for free. “We hope that the government will eventually put all of these documents in an open archive, but until then this repository will grow with use,” said Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle at the time. Today the repository holds around 1.5 million documents.
[Clip]
The U.S. Congress is scheduled to kick off a series of hearings today that explore how the PACER database is operated — and the Internet Archive has issued an open letter that includes an offer to become the official host of PACER data to “…make the works of our federal courts more readily available, to inform the citizenry, and to further the effective and fair administration of justice,” according to a blog poston the matter.
“By this submission, the Internet Archive would like to clearly state to the Judiciary Committee, as well as to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and the Judicial Conference of the United States, that we would be delighted to archive and host — for free, forever, and without restriction on access to the public — all records contained in PACER,” says Kahle, in the letter.

Read the Complete Article
Direct to Complete Internet Archive Blog Post and Letter to Congress

Filed under: Data Files, Libraries, News, Open Access