Christopher Shea, Attorney at Law, LLC

RECAP and PACER

The ABA Journal has an interesting article about a clever new Firefox browser plug-in called RECAP, which is intended to expand access to federal court documents. RECAP duplicates documents that are accessed through the PACER website and stores them in a free public archive. PACER, in contrast, charges eight cents per page. The “Watch RECAP in Action” video here shows how it works. It will be interesting to see how this project progresses and whether any challenges will be raised. TechCrunch has a brief discussion of some of the issues here. As one of the commenters to the TechCrunch piece points out, one issue is the inadvertent publication of confidential information, if a document is subject to a protective order. I note also that RECAP’s terms of use purport to shift risk to the user, and that RECAP’s “About” page raises some questions as to the legality of RECAP.

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