If you want to search federal court documents, it's not a problem. Just apply online for an account, and the government will issue you a user name and password.

Through the postal service.

And once you log in, the government's courthouse search engine known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records or PACER, will charge you 8 cents a page to read documents that are in the public domain – a fee that earned the federal judiciary $50 million in profits in 2006.

With its high cost and limited functionality, critics call the system an absurdity in the era of Google, blogs and Wikipedia, where information is free and bandwidth, disk space and processing power are nearly so.

"The PACER system is the most broken part of our federal legal mechanism," says Carl Malamud, who runs the nonprofit open-government group Public.Resource.Org ."They have a mainframe mentality."

Now Malamud is doing something about it. He's asking lawyers to donate their PACER documents one by one, which he then classifies and bundles into ZIP files published for free at his organization's website. The one-year-old effort has garnered him 20 percent of all the files on PACER, including all decisions from federal appeals courts over the last 50 years.

The project is important, he says, because court filings are a part of the fabric of a democracy, and should be freely available to average citizens. "We are going after all primary legal materials in the U.S.," Malamud says. "That's part of America's OS, and we think it should be open source." [Disclosure: Wired.com nurtures a hefty PACER bill].

Malamud is a man accustomed to finding ways to provide free and easy online access to government documents.

Back in 1995, the Securities and Exchange Committee decided to put corporate filings online only after Malamud essentially shamed them into doing so. For two years he operated a free site that published the filings, then abruptly pulled the plug and directed angry users to the SEC.

He's since won battles freeing the nation's catalog of copyrights, Oregon's book of state laws, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark database. Now, he's after congressional-hearing videos, expensive but copyright-free building codes, and the Code of Federal Regulations, in addition to all the court filings in the PACER database.

While Malamud's budget is only about $1 million annually, he has a matching grant from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's philanthropy group and help from influential tech friends like Tim O'Reilly, Paul Vixie and Larry Lessig.

Malamud dreams of a day PACER's legal documents are free, so that academics and entrepreneurs can create custom search engines and new tools to make the information available to American citizens.

But that's what PACER does now, counters U.S. Courts spokesman Richard Carelli.

"PACER is the greatest technological achievement in the court system in the last 20 years," Carelli says.

The search system has already revolutionized access to court records, Carelli submits, by preventing time-consuming trips to federal courthouses and undercutting photocopy fees. PACER is also experimenting with making digital audio recordings of cases available online, and – at least during the pilot – a copy of an audio file costs just 8 cents, regardless of length.

What's more, PACER already gives its 900,000 users free access to judicial opinions, and citizens don't have to pay if they look at less than $10 worth of filings a year, Carelli says.

Indeed, PACER is both revolutionary and cheap when compared to the state and local courts that have no electronic records at all, or charge $5 just to run a record search, even if it comes up empty, as in the case of Los Angeles Superior Court.

But PACER's interface feels like something designed for the Department of Motor Vehicles, and the system lacks any way to search the text of legal documents. Interested in finding all cases alleging music piracy, or in discovering how often Steve Jobs is mentioned in a court filing? Want to be e-mailed when there's a new filing comes in a specific case? How about an RSS feed of a certain court's decisions? You'll find no help from PACER.

Who wants information like that? Tim Stanley, the CEO of Justia.com, for one.

After Stanley sold his legal-information company Findlaw to one of the nations' top legal-publishing concerns, West Publishing, he started a profitable web-design house for law firms. He uses the revenue to give away legal documents through the legal search engine Justia.com.

"West makes billions of dollars selling stuff we want to give away for free," Stanley boasts.

Justia now lets academics and journalists follow cases of interest for free, and publishes some case files online for everyone to see. His company purchased and digitized all the Supreme Court decisions, put up the first free search engine for them, and donated them to PublicResource.org.

Now Justia's working with Cornell University to throw some Web 2.0 tools into the mix, including wiki pages for decisions, automated tracking of citations to decisions, and tools to track what briefs a particular attorney has written.

Other efforts include AltLaw.org, a free legal search engine created by law professors Tim Wu and Paul Ohm, and Ed Walter's comprehensive Public Library of Law, which covers state courts as well.

Some issues have surfaced as old court files migrate online and then get spidered by Google and other search engines. Malamud says he's been contacted by people shocked to find an old lawsuit in which they were named suddenly popping up in search results on their names; he's currently blocking search engines from indexing his PACER files through robots.txt. Malamud says that there are also massive privacy violations lurking inside some court filings, since clerks, judges and lawyers aren't adhering to rules about what can and can't be in legal filings.

Public.Resource.org used some primitive software tools to search for social security numbers in court filings from 32 district courts. The results: 1,700 confirmed documents, including one from a Massachusetts court that had a 54-page list of the names, medical problems, Social Security numbers and birth dates of 353 patients.

The fix for these glitches is more sunshine, Malamud argues, not less.

"Public interest groups and the public in general, when given access to these public records, are able to provide the kind of feedback that leads to the correction of these privacy issues," Malamud recently told administrators at U.S. courts. "If we want to be serious about personal privacy, we can only do so if we are also serious about public access."

But the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has already experimented with making PACER free to the public, and it found the concept lacking.

In 2007, the office launched a trial at 16 libraries around the country that allowed unlimited free access from library computers. The trial was suspended last September, after Malamud encouraged volunteers to visit the libraries and download large numbers of cases to USB drives and donate them to the commons.

Carelli won't say why the trial was suspended, or if Malamud's "Thumb-Drive Corps" was a factor in the decision. Malamud won't discuss it either, but noted in a letter to the courts last October that the abortive trial "was run with no written or oral guidelines on appropriate use."

Malamud says he's looking forward to the day he doesn't have to game the system. "If I had $10 million, I'd make a copy of all the documents and be done."