At Ars Technica, Tim Lee notes that the federal courts are now increasing the free for accessing public court records. Wait a second. There’s a fee for accessing public court records? There is indeed. And these fees are on track to generate $100 million this year. Tim explains what exactly is being done with this money:

What do the courts do with all that money? In 2007, a judicial committee reported that “significant unobligated balances have accumulated” as a result of growing PACER usage. It proposed to use the extra funds for various IT projects.
One example is a courtroom renovation one judge described at a 2010 conference. He said that as a result of PACER fees, “every juror has their own flatscreen monitors,” and there are also monitors for members of the public to see. His courtroom also got the latest audio technology. “We just put in new audio so that people—I’d never heard of this before—but it actually embeds the speakers inside of the benches in the back of the courtroom and inside counsel tables so that the wood benches actually perform as amplifiers,” the judge said.
It’s great for courtrooms to have better A/V technologies. But diverting PACER fees to projects unrelated to PACER may be illegal. Harlan Yu, an open government expert at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, points to the 2002 law authorizing the PACER fees, which states that those fees may be charged “only to the extent necessary” to cover the costs of providing public access. Congress “sought to have a system in which the information is ‘freely available to the greatest extent possible,’” he told Ars, quoting from the conference report that accompanied the legislation.

The “only to the extent necessary” fees would probably round out to, oh, $0.00.

Yu argued that the very concept of charging for copies of public records is misguided. He suggested that instead of jacking up fees in order to fund the development of a more elaborate PACER site, the courts should publish their raw data and allow private parties, from Google to the Internet Archive, to build websites using that data.

This might mean fewer flatscreen monitors. But it would also mean that impecunious Americans would have easier access to public court records.