Federal courts approve fee break for records
People who access court documents electronically from federal district courts through the PACER system pay 8 cents a page for the privilege, but until this spring, they got the first $10 worth of copies in a year without charge. Now, the Judicial Conference of the United States has approved a change: Users will not be billed unless they've racked up more than $10 in PACER charges in a quarter.
The federal courts said the impact of the change is "in effect quadrupling the amount of data available without charge." To set up a PACER account or learn more about the federal courts' electronic records service, go to www.pacer.gov.
