Timothy B. Lee has posted The inside story of Aaron Swartz’s campaign to liberate court filings, at Ars Technica.
The article describes Lee’s recent interview with Stephen Schultze about his and Swartz’s efforts to make U.S. federal court documents public.
Here is an excerpt:
A key figure in Swartz’s PACER effort was Steve Schultze, now a researcher at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Schultze recruited Swartz to the PACER fight and wrote the Perl script Swartz modified and then used to scrape the site.
Until recently, Schultze has been quiet about his role in Swartz’s PACER scraping caper. But Swartz’s death inspired Schultze to speak out. In a recent phone interview, Schultze described how Swartz downloaded gigabytes of PACER data and how that data has been put to use throughout the last four years. Schultze told us he hopes the outrage over Swartz’s death will provide momentum for legislation to finish the job Swartz and Schultze started almost five years ago: tearing down PACER’s paywall. [...]
Click here for information about Schultze’s new Open PACER project.
For more details, please see the complete article.
Tags: Aaron Swartz, Ars Technica, Free access to law, Open PACER, PACER, Public access to court decisions, Public access to court documents, Public access to court records, Public access to judicial decisions, Public access to judicial documents, Public access to judicial records, Public access to legal information, RECAP, Stephen Schultze, Tim Lee, Timothy B Lee
