Posted by Greg on April 25, 2007 at 21:59:33 (EST):
In Reply to: Re: Access to County Records- Look at Allegheny County posted by Uncommon Sense on April 25, 2007 at 20:40:43 (EST):
: Your 'dirt rag' would be the county legal journal. And before you even start, no you don't have a right to the county legal journal for free. You have to buy it, borrow it, steal it, or find one.
: Greg, you talking in a cricle. I.e. your not making a point. Yes, those things you listed are public informtion. However, you don't have a right to access that information via your home computer for free. Your not going to find such a silly right (the right to sit in your pjs and get county informtion via the internet at 4am) in the U.S. or State Consitution, federal, state, and/or local law and and/or court rulings.
: So currently, your options are A) Go to the county or local office and request the file B) pay another service that will provide it to you or C) go pound salt.
You have to pay for the journal because it is a tangible object that is produced. The information is gathered, sorted, printed into a booklet and mailed to your home for a monthly fee. Producing and deliverying 1000 journals costs more than 100 does. No, I don't have a right to the journal for free.
I do have a right to access all the information that is in it...and more.
This website however, is charging a minimum of $25 per month just to have access to information we are all supposed to have access to.
It doesn't cost them any more for 10,000 people to access this information than it does for one. In fact, if they had sponsors on the site, the more people that accessed it, the cheaper it would be. These sponsors all pay by the number of times a site is visited.
What the hell is your obsession with the TIME the information is accessed? I'll clarify another thing for you. It doesn't matter if a person accesses the information at 1pm or 1am.
You know, some people work for a living and can't take a half a day off to drive to the courthouse and get this information "for free". Even if they did, it'd still cost them lost pay and gas money.
No, I'm not going to see a right to accesss it online in my pj's. By the way, what the hell is your obsession with me in my pj's anyhow?
The fact remains that the county has the information online, yet is charging a ridiculous fee to access it from anywhere other than the courthouse. If they have it online, access to it should be free. If not free, at least reasonable.
This isn't some company that took it upon themselves to collect all the data and put it in a data base. It's a company that was hired by the county to do so, then given permission to charge whatever the hell they want.
Your "option B"...you do realize...don't you...that when you access this inforamtion online there isn't some guy going and collecting the info for you at that time?
I can't see you thinking this, but it would explain you obsession with what time the info was accessed.