The federal courts announced on Tuesday that they would be increasing fees for accessing public court records by 25 percent, from 8¢ per page to 10¢ per page. Most Americans have never heard of PACER, the website the federal courts use to distribute judicial records. But for thousands of journalists, academics, and practicing attorneys, news of the fee hike produced a collective groan.

The courts emphasize that they haven't raised PACER fees since 2005, when they increased the fee from 7¢ to 8¢ per page. But with rising usage, revenues had been growing anyway. With the new increase, PACER revenues will likely exceed $100 million per year.

An IT slush fund

What do the courts do with all that money? In 2007, a judicial committee reported that "significant unobligated balances have accumulated" as a result of growing PACER usage. It proposed to use the extra funds for various IT projects.

One example is a courtroom renovation one judge described at a 2010 conference. He said that as a result of PACER fees, "every juror has their own flatscreen monitors," and there are also monitors for members of the public to see. His courtroom also got the latest audio technology. "We just put in new audio so that people—I'd never heard of this before—but it actually embeds the speakers inside of the benches in the back of the courtroom and inside counsel tables so that the wood benches actually perform as amplifiers," the judge said.

It's great for courtrooms to have better A/V technologies. But diverting PACER fees to projects unrelated to PACER may be illegal. Harlan Yu, an open government expert at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, points to the 2002 law authorizing the PACER fees, which states that those fees may be charged "only to the extent necessary" to cover the costs of providing public access. Congress "sought to have a system in which the information is 'freely available to the greatest extent possible,'" he told Ars, quoting from the conference report that accompanied the legislation.

Trimming the fat

Yu said there's lots of room for cost-cutting. With private-sector IT costs dropping, "it seems unreasonable for the courts to be raising costs," he said. Instead, "the courts need to rethink how PACER is built."

For example, there isn't just one PACER website for the whole country. Instead, there are actually around 200 separate PACER websites, each serving a different judicial district. Consolidating those 200 servers into a single website hosted from a modern data center would improve the user experience and dramatically reduce IT costs.

Indeed, Yu argued that the very concept of charging for copies of public records is misguided. He suggested that instead of jacking up fees in order to fund the development of a more elaborate PACER site, the courts should publish their raw data and allow private parties, from Google to the Internet Archive, to build websites using that data.

"Congress needs to consider funding PACER out of general appropriations," Yu told Ars. "It's really shutting people out from being able to learn the laws that they need to abide by in our society." Of course, if PACER were run in a cost-effective matter, and without a paywall, it would cost a lot less than $100 million.

Disclosure: Yu and I were colleagues at Princeton, where we collaborated on the RECAP project to liberate court records from PACER.