Time for a RECAP

Just about every Cory Doctorow novel contains at least one mini-lecture on a topic he thinks is needed for to understand an aspect of the story. In Little Brother, it was about the way two-way encryption works, and every time I reached that part of the book, my eyes glazed over.

In his latest book, The Bezzle, my eyes didn't glaze over. One of the topics is the privatization of law, which I knew almost nothing about.

Since 1998, case law has been paywalled in an online system called PACER. Access is by the PDF page, and the search tools are bad, so it's easy to rack up bills fast. Which is not that big a problem for law firms who bill their clients, but is a big impediment to anyone else.

Starting in 2009, open-access activists created a browser plug-in called RECAP (PACER backwards, get it?) that downloads every page as its accessed from PACER and puts it into an open archive where anyone can reach it. Then when someone searches PACER, if the page exists in RECAP, it sends the free copy to the searcher before they're charged by PACER.

"RECAP," Doctorow's first-person character narrates, "exists because the law belongs to all of us. U.S. law — like all works created by the U.S. government — is in the public domain."

In 2007, 17 public libraries were given free access to PACER (I imagine that was after an earlier round of complaints). With that access, open-access activists brought thumb drives to those libraries and copied as much PACER content as they could to upload to RECAP.

21-year-old Aaron Swartz was one of those activists. He downloaded and freed up to $2 million worth of documents at the libraries to upload to RECAP. 

It has been 11 years now since Swartz's death. If you don't know about Swartz, this Rolling Stone article from early 2013 gives a good overview of his life and what led to his death at age 26.

In addition to finding out about the existence of PACER and RECAP, I learned today that as a pre-teen and then a teen, Aaron Swartz was involved in the development of RSS, the Creative Commons, and Reddit. I also learned that in the time just before his death, he had become good friends with Ben Wikler, a name I now know because Wikler is head of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, and he's in the national news periodically when it comes to that state's Republican gerrymandering and election denialism.

It's always strange when you start from one fact you never knew and end up with a bunch of others.