It's almost like it would be nice if a hacker used library access to download a bunch of federal court electronic records and provided public access to them, possibly with the assistance of a major university.
Spare us your sarcasm. What you want is already available via http://bulk.resource.org There is no copyright on judicial or legislative proceedings, nor any restrictions upon their distribution.
It is now. Wasn't that the whole reason aaronsw liberated PACER? (I honestly still don't understand all the parts of the federal court publication system; PACER, the commercial stuff like Lexis/Nexis, physical records, aaronsw's actions, etc. -- there are a lot of fairly undocumented parts)
Carl Malamud is the person behind resource.org. aaronsw downloaded several million documents breaking PACER's TOS, but no action was taken. The archive and 'firehose' feeds on resource.org are mainly thanks to a long-running lobbying campaign by Malamud and others. The PACER system is semi-free to access but part of why it has overhead costs is that it's integrated with ECF, which attorneys use to file documents in Federal court. The cost structure is a legacy of its heritage as a document retrieval system used in brick & mortar court offices where the per-page cost was tied to the paper and printing overhead. Copyright has never been an issue in regards to PACER.
