One of Aaron Swartz’s more epic hacks was the liberation of $1.5M worth of caselaw from PACER, the US government’s proprietary court-records database, pushing them into RECAP, the free/open alternative that gives everyone access to American law.
The Think Computer Foundation produced a set of grants in Aaron’s memory to accomplish a pair of long-sought features to RECAP, and they’ve announced that these features have been added:
Ka-Ping Yee, a Canadian software developer living in Northern California, has created a version of RECAP for Google’s Chrome browser. This gives RECAP a much larger base of potential users. Previously, RECAP had only been available for the Mozilla Firefox browser. The RECAP Chrome extension can be downloaded at recapthelaw.org.
Filippo Valsorda and Alessio Palmero Aprosio, both from Italy, have improved RECAP to support the version of PACER used by the U.S. appellate courts. This new functionality helps to dramatically expand the scope of citizens’ free access to United States case law. This improved Firefox version of the extension is also available at recapthelaw.org, and appellate functionality will be available soon for Chrome as well.
These awards recognize work that furthers Swartz’s ideals of information freedom and openness. The remaining grant involves visualizing data available on Think Computer Foundation’s PlainSite web site (the deadline for which has been extended to May 31, 2013 as work on PlainSite continues).
Two RECAP Grants Awarded in Memory of Aaron Swartz
(via Freedom to Tinker)