Internet Archive Offers to Host PACER Data

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The Internet Archive has long supported the efforts of the Free Law Movement to make the laws and edicts of government of the United States more broadly available. With our colleague Aaron Swartz and the efforts of numerous groups across the country including the Free Law Foundation and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, we host the RECAP repository of documents from the federal district courts. Many of these public domain document were downloaded by users of the goverment’s PACER system for $0.10 per page and uploaded to the Internet Archive. The RECAP repository is available for free, and in bulk, which is useful for researchers.

On Tuesday, February 14, the U.S. Congress will hold the first hearings in over a decade examining the operation of the PACER system. The hearing will be before the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual telegram data Property and the Internet of the Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives. The Internet Archive was pleased to accept the committee’s invitation to submit a statement for the record and we have submitted the following, which includes an offer to host the PACER data now and forever 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.

Our courts must function in the light of day, and in this day and age that means on the Internet. The Internet Archive is happy to try to help.

Thank you for the opportunity to submit comments on the Judiciary Committee’s hearing entitled “Judicial Transparency and Ethics.” I write on behalf of the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library that is based in San Francisco with facilities throughout the world.

For more than 20 years, the Internet Archive has been archiving digital collections and making them available at no cost and with no restriction on the Internet. The Internet Archive works with the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and numerous national libraries around the world to collect, store, and provide permanent access to millions of books, videos, audio and hundreds of millions of pages of U.S. government documents, including over 14,000 hours of video of Congressional hearings.

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.

People download more than 20 million books from the Internet Archive each month. We preserve 1 billion web pages each week for public access through the “Wayback Machine.” Indeed, the Wayback Machine is the only publicly accessible archive of all the websites of Congress. At any given moment, we are delivering about 30 gigabits of data per second. We host more than 20 petabytes of data in total.

By comparison, the PACER corpus is a fraction of a petabyte and does not use a significant amount of bandwidth. We have the capacity to host this information, and I know there are many other organizations on the Internet who would be able to make dramatic increases in the usability and utility of our Federal Judiciary’s database if it were made available in a more modern fashion and without artificial restrictions on use.