March 19, 2024

Judge Declares Some PACER Fees Illegal but Does Not Go Far Enough

Five years ago, in a post called “Making Excuses for Fees on Electronic Public Records,” I described my attempts to persuade the federal Judiciary to stop charging for access to their web-based system, PACER (“Public Access to Court Electronic Records”). Nearly every search, page view, and PDF download from the system incurs a fee ranging […]

Free Law Project Partnering in Stewardship of RECAP

More than five years ago, I spoke at CITP about the US Federal Courts electronic access system called PACER. I noted that despite centuries of precedent stating that the public should have access to the law as openly and freely as possible, the courts were charging unreasonable rates for access to the public record. As […]

Take Over My Dream Job: Associate Director at CITP

Nearly four years ago, I joined the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton as Associate Director. The CITP community is a fantastic collection of smart and funny people who work passionately on all aspects of information technology policy. It was my dream job, so it was bittersweet when I accepted a new job working […]

I Join the EFF and Others in Calling for Craigslist to Drop CFAA Claims

[Cross-posted on my blog, Managing Miracles] Craigslist is suing several companies that scrape data from Craigslist advertisements. These companies, like Padmapper and 3taps, repurpose the data in order to provide more useful ways of searching through the ads. I have written about this in earlier posts, “Dear Craig: Voluntarily Dismiss with Prejudice,” and “A Response […]

Arlington v. FCC: What it Means for Net Neutrality

[Cross-posted on my blog, Managing Miracles] On Monday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Arlington v. FCC. At issue was a very abstract legal question: whether the FCC has the right to interpret the scope of its own authority in cases in which congress has left the contours of their jurisdiction ambiguous. In […]