I have been pondering scraping PACER and hosting it for free. http://www.pacer.gov
Given PACER's stupid payment model, I've actually come up with some rather bizarre approaches to scraping that don't seem to violate the terms of service. Anyway, I still don't really know whether it's worthwhile; I rarely look up court records, but maybe I would if they were available through non-proprietary and inexpensive means. Those of you who regularly use court records can help me by answering the following questions. You can reply to me personally in case replying to the whole list seems too spammy, but I'd love for this to turn into a more open-ended discussion too. 1 Would a free-of-charge PACER clone be at all useful to you? * To measure its utility: If it had a yearly fundraising campaign, how much do you think you would you donate to it for one year? 2 What other sorts of people would use it? 3 Is there a particular set of case records that might be particularly useful? 4 Is there a different web database that you would particularly like to be liberated? Tom _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss
