Re:Finishing what Aaron Swartz started with PACER
by DannyBee on Tuesday January 22, 2013 @07:57PM
(#5100711)
I'm saying scholar has a problem in actually getting the data to give it to you, and that is the problem trying to be solved by getting PACER to open up.
Re:Finishing what Aaron Swartz started with PACER
by igurari on Tuesday January 22, 2013 @08:20PM
(#5100790)
And I'm saying that is not true. Scholar has nearly all of the cases anyone cares about - that's how they can index and serve them. (I say this as a former Google Scholar engineer.) If you are an individual, you can read the cases on Scholar. If you are a business and want to buy the cases in bulk - then you can find someone to sell them to you.
Opening up PACER really doesn't help in practice because the data is ridiculously dirty - crappy scanned PDFs which people then pay to have triple keyed.
If your interest is in getting and providing bulk access to cases, then yes, you have obstacles. But that is only a problem for a select few individuals/companies who care about this as a business or hobby. The end users you may be trying to service by offering access to the cases can already get access to the cases from Google for free.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not intending to downplay or diminish the efforts of you and others to open up access to those older cases. I think that is great. All I am saying is that for the vast majority of people, the vast majority of the time, there really isn't a problem in finding cases online.