Does anyone happen to know whether it's legal to download the PDF's of court records via PACER? PACER in the USA is basically a system to access all court records which are at the District (Federal, but districts are often states or part of states) courts records. I have the manual here but I figured some of you might know. A relative has a bankruptcy case ongoing and I'd like to just save all 50 or so court documents if I can. Printing is another thing, I think.. because they want 10 cents per page which is bullshit. They can't know you have saved the PDF I assume, even if you don't disconnect your net connection before doing the control +S. I also have the full Adobe Acrobat DC on this machine anyway...
>You have to pay money for court documents in America
Wew lad
Are they public documents?
If you access via fee free, then you can't share anything you download.
If you pay for the docs you can give them to whoever you like. A Firefox/Chrome extension will mirror anything you do on PACER for free.
https://www.recapthelaw.org/about/
What does RECAP do?
>RECAP is an extension (or “add on”) for the Firefox web browser that improves the PACER experience while helping PACER users build a free and open repository of public court records. RECAP users automatically donate the documents they purchase from PACER into a public repository hosted by the Internet Archive. And RECAP saves users money by alerting them when a document they are searching for is already available from this repository. RECAP also makes other enhancements to the PACER experience, including more user-friendly file names.
>Is sharing court documents a violation of copyright law?
>The court-created documents provided by PACER are works of the federal government, and under copyright law, are automatically placed in the public domain and may be shared without legal restriction. The question is a little bit more complicated for documents filed by third parties, so we asked a prominent legal scholar about it. He told us that such documents may be under copyright, but he thought redistributing copyrighted court documents was legal under copyright’s fair use doctrine. However, there is very little case law in this area (some examples are here and here), so it’s impossible to be sure. We certainly believe citizens ought to have the freedom to share public court documents, and we hope RECAP users will help to establish that precedent.
>>54820130
I don't know, but I will say this: by law copyright cannot exist for federally created works, that is public domain. However, copyright can exist for documents that a plaintiff/defendant created or submitted into the PACER record. Though, if the plaintiff/defendant submitted the documents into PACER, there is a strong case for "fair use" if you're only downloading from PACER, and furthermore PACER would be held equally liable as you for any potential copyright infringement claim, so you would be protected by whatever defense PACER/government comes up with to avoid copyright infringement claims.
>>54820130
>>54821444
Sounds like a contract questions, read the terms of whatever agreement you agreed to when using pacer.
