RECAP is a suite of browser extensions
that improves the experience of using PACER,
the electronic public access system for the U.S. Federal Courts. When
you pay for documents on PACER, RECAP helps you give back by
contributing those documents to a public archive hosted by the
Internet Archive. RECAP also saves you money when you use PACER by
showing you when documents are available at no cost from the
Archive. If you use PACER you should install RECAP to save money and
contribute to our public archive.
Michael Lissner is a developer and Brian Carver is an attorney and
both are members of Free Law Project's
Board of Directors.
Can you tell us a bit of the history behind RECAP?
In 2008, Carl Malamud began putting PACER documents on
resource.org and encouraging others to help
"recycle" those documents. In the Spring of 2009, Aaron Swartz heeded
Carl Malamud's call to take advantage of PACER's no-cost trial at 17
libraries across the country and Swartz downloaded nearly 20 million
pages before the courts cut him off. At the same Timothy B. Lee had
written
about the deficiencies of the PACER system, and Stephen Schultze had
been working for some time at Harvard's
Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
Working paper
about PACER. At Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy
("CITP"), Harlan Yu, Stephen Schultze, and Timothy B. Lee, under the
supervision of Prof. Ed Felten, were thinking and
writing about public access to the
documents and data government creates.
So, there was a perfect confluence of people concerned about this
issue at the same time and several of them, at CITP, managed to work
together to create RECAP as one way to crowd-source a partial solution
to the public access problems that government seemed unwilling to
address.
In May of 2014, CITP announced that it was partnering with
Free Law Project for the continued
maintenance and development of RECAP. As RECAP approached its fifth
birthday, all the original developers had moved on from Princeton to
exciting careers elsewhere. In the meantime, Free Law Project had
sprung up as a non-profit dedicated to providing access to court
documents and to building free software legal research tools, such as
their AGPLv3-licensed
CourtListener platform. Free Law
Project was the obvious long-term home for RECAP and now Princeton's
CITP and Free Law Project continue to work together to ensure that
RECAP is supported until the courts make all these public domain
documents available at no cost.
How are people using RECAP?
Thousands of people use RECAP every day. Unfortunately, the PACER
system has stayed almost exactly the same since 2009 and now the
courts charge PACER users even more per page than they did in 2009. So
the need for RECAP as a means of permanently removing these public
domain documents from behind a paywall remains stronger than ever. We
hear from users that simply enjoy knowing that they are contributing
to a public archive and from users for whom the charges PACER imposes
are a real burden.
What features do you think really sets RECAP apart from similar software?
As far as we know, RECAP is an extremely unique hack to solve an
extremely unique problem. Most sites don't charge 10 cents per page
for electronic documents. The PACER system is a bizarre throwback to
the days of copy machines. And even where a large collection of
documents might exist behind a paywall, such as academic journal
articles, those documents are generally still under copyright and
unlike the public domain court records that RECAP seeks to
collect. So, building RECAP-like software in other contexts might be
frustrated by copyright law. But one thing that is particularly
ingenious about RECAP is that it so clearly illustrates the individual
benefit that can be derived from the creation of a commons. RECAP
users save themselves money. While most users tell us they are excited
to give back to the project and that they like that the documents
PACER forces them to buy are uploaded to our archive, we don't have to
rely on altruistic motives to gain users. Even users that might
download RECAP motivated only by their own self-interest in saving
money end up contributing documents to our archive, making the overall
usefulness of RECAP increase every single day, one document at a time.
Why did you choose the GNU GPLv3+ as RECAP's license?
We asked the original developers why they chose GPLv3 and no one could
recall for sure. We suspect it was for the usual reasons: GPLv3 is
well known and understood among developers and its use signals that
one's project is committed to free software.
How can users (technical or otherwise) help contribute to RECAP?
There are several ways that both technical and non-technical users can
contribute to RECAP. First, you don't have to be an attorney with a
regular PACER habit to install RECAP and start contributing
documents. PACER does not charge users for the first $15 worth of
downloads they make each quarter. So, Free Law Project has created
instructions
for anyone to donate their $15 worth of no-charge PACER usage and, if
you like, will even send you a reminder email as the end of the
quarter approaches. Free Law Project would like for the
PACER Problem
to go away and so have also written about the ways people can write to
Congress and the courts to urge them to end the current PACER fee
structure.
Free Law Project has also just begun a major development effort to
overhaul the RECAP extensions and the RECAP Server in an effort that
will integrate all the RECAP documents into CourtListener's existing
2.9 million court documents, making the RECAP archive full-text
searchable for the first time. Developers with experience working on
browser extensions, APIs, Python, Django, or solr that would like to
learn how they might contribute should express interest at
info@recapthelaw.org or start working on issues posted in our
repository.
What's the next big thing for RECAP?
The major development effort now under way is focused on several
improvements. First, we aim to make user uploads faster and more
predictable so that users can see the impact of their contribution
reflected as quickly as possible. Second, we want to make all these
documents full-text searchable by combining them with CourtListener
documents to create the largest no-cost searchable collection of court
documents on the Internet. Third, we want to create a robust API to
enable more sophisticated parties to programmatically interact with
the RECAP collection so that they can create additional useful
third-party services.
Any final thoughts?
Everything Free Law Project develops is free software. We've built our
CourtListener platform by piecing together existing free software
tools and RECAP also makes use of several major free software
projects. We don't want there to be any barriers to someone else being
able to contribute to our efforts and so actively avoid any dependency
that is not free software. Ultimately the work of the Free Software
Foundation has inspired and made possible what we are trying to do,
and so we and all those that might benefit from our efforts ultimately
owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Free Software
Foundation. Thank you.
Enjoy this interview? Check out our previous entry in this series,
featuring
Joël Krähemann, maintainer of Advanced GTK+ Sequencer.
