US House Passes Bill to Tear Down Judiciary’s Paywall
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
US House passes bill to tear down judiciary's paywall:
The US House of Representatives on Wednesday passed the Open Courts Act. The bill aims to modernize PACER, the website that provides public access to federal court records. It also aims to eliminate PACER's paywall by 2025.
The PACER system represented a big advance for judicial transparency when it went online in the 1990s. But the system hasn't kept up with the times, with a user interface that has changed little since the days of dial-up Internet.
Each federal trial and bankruptcy court-around 200 courts in total-has its own distinct PACER website, with limited capabilities to search across multiple sites. Not only is this inconvenient for users, but maintaining dozens of separate websites is an administrative headache.
[...] The Open Courts Act aims to modernize the system in two phases. In the first phase, scheduled for completion by 2025, the courts would replace the current patchwork system with a national, searchable PACER website.
[...] After the House vote, the legislation must pass the Senate before it can go to President Trump for his signature. On Wednesday, a bipartisan pair of US senators-Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)-introduced a Senate version of the Open Courts Act. It's not clear if advocates can get the bill through the Senate in the three weeks before the current session of Congress expires. But even if they fail, the successful House vote will give the proposal momentum in 2021.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.