Tear down this paywall: court records are expensive and inaccessible. It's time for information liberation.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Columns - Public Access to Court Electronic Records - Column

LET THE RECORD SHOW that the people who created Public Access to Court Electronic Records, a.k.a. PACER, think their database of judicial records is awesome. "PACER has been one of the great success stories of the federal Judiciary," exclaims bankruptcy judge J. Richard Leonard in the August 2010 edition of The Third Branch, a monthly newsletter published by the Administrative Office (A.O.) of the U.S. Courts. "The very good news, ha, ha, is that our users are happy," chortles Michel Ishakian, chief of the A.O.'s Public Access and Records Management Division in a video news release that appears on the database's website.

Not everyone, however, is so pleased with PACER, which is an Internet-based service that allows attorneys, litigants, and other interested parties to access docket sheets, judicial opinions, and other documents related to federal cases. "Its user interface sucks," says Carl Malamud, an open government gadfly and founder of public.resource.org. "Browsers aren't supported properly. There's no API. There's no batch access."

But perhaps what galls Malamud and other PACER critics most is the system's access fees. For the last several years, Malamud and various others, including Steve Schultze, associate director of Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy, have been insisting that the government is spending way too much to develop and maintain PACER given its limited functionality, while charging users way too much to access it. On April 1, as if on cue, the A.O. raised PACER prices by 25 percent--from 8 cents to 10 cents per page. At that rate, a weekday copy of The New York Times would go for $7 or $8, and Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs would cost $65.60.

PACER debuted in 1988 as a forward-thinking dial-up system allowing users equipped with a modem and a copy of PC Anywhere to access case materials from a handful of federal courts. Three years later, Congress decided the service should be self-supporting and authorized the federal judiciary to charge users a "reasonable" fee for accessing it. Perhaps taking inspiration from the popular 976 phone sex lines of that era, the A.O. initiated a fee of $1 per minute. The average reader could get through a 10,000-word judicial opinion for $40 or so.

Even at such seemingly exorbitant rates, PACER was a revolutionary leap forward. Prior to the service, federal courts kept exactly one paper copy of each document associated with any given case in their...