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RECAP: Turning PACER Around


Date:
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Time:
12:30 pm

Location

Sherrerd Hall, 3rd floor open space
Princeton, NJ 08544 United States + Google Map

Food and discussion begins at 12:30 pm. Everyone invited.

RECAP is a new CITP-developed tool that aims to bring an unprecedented level of transparency to the U.S. federal court system. RECAP is a plug-in for the Firefox web browser that makes it easier for users to share documents they have purchased from PACER, the court’s pay-to-play access system. With the plug-in installed, users still have to pay each time they use PACER, but whenever they do retrieve a PACER document, RECAP automatically and effortlessly donates a copy of that document to a public repository hosted at the Internet Archive. The documents in this repository are, in turn, shared with other RECAP users, who will be notified whenever documents they are looking for can be downloaded from the free public repository. RECAP helps users exercise their rights under copyright law, which expressly places government works in the public domain. It also helps users advance the public good by contributing to an extensive and freely available archive of public court documents.

The RECAP repository already has over about 1.4 million documents available for free download. Together, with the help of RECAP users, we can recapture truly public access to the court proceedings that give our laws their practical meaning.

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/harlanyu/introducing-recap-turning-pacer-around