Re: Access to County Records- Look at Allegheny County

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: : : TANSTAAFL is the first lesson you should have learned in a simple Econ class. : : : There aint no such thing as free lunch. : : : Or in this case, there aint no such thing as a free records. Posting records on the internet and storing them costs money. Your being foolish pretending that there is no costs for doing such a thing. On top of that you just prove my point the more you jabber on. You think it's fine for paper products to charge a fee because there is a costs to it and a product provided. However you living in make believe land thinking that there is no costs to putting informtion into a database and stored for the whole world to see. Somebody is getting paid to post the informtion to the database. You have to pay somebody to maintain such database. Someobdy is getting paid to create a software taht enables you to search the database. And, you don't just get to put the database online for free. Somebody gets paid to store it for you. And last of all, somebody has to pay for all those servers keeping the informtion up. : : : Greg, if your not going to find the time to go to the courthouse and find the record, then it's really not that imporant. Again, your thinking that here is no fixed costs, labor, and other costs in having the informtion online is just, foolish. : : : FYI, the journal is $1 a week or $40 for a year. : : : I am not saying it doesn't cost money to store and post this information. : : : : What I am saying is that they (the county) had the information stored for other reasons. So it would not be lost in case of fire or some other disaster. And so it could be accessed more easily by the people at the courthouse...who can do it there for free. : : This leaves online access the only thing that they could possibly justify. Which they cannot. : : The county already has a website. They could easily provide access to this information through their own website. So it wouldn't cost hardly anything addtional. : : One can go to: http://co.armstrong.pa.us/coronerindex.htm at any time... and in his "PJ'S" if he wishes. : : All they would need to do is link that website to the database the records is in, and it would be the same as if a person was at the courthouse. : : What infocon is doing is basically charging a MINIMUM of $25 per month for this type of link. : : The $40 is what I remembered. I didn't realize it was for the whole year. : : However, that just further proves my point. They are able to actually gather the information, print it out in a booklet and deliver it to a person's home or office for less than $4 per month. Yet infocon is charging $25 per month PLUS $1.10 per minute to access the very same information...without actually providing anything tangible. How long do you think you'd have to be on the website to access all the information that's contained in 4-5 journals that come out each month. : : Who are you, or anybody for that matter, to say HOW important it is to get whatever information they want. It doesn't matter if they desparately need it for something, or if tey want it just because their nosey. It is their right to access it and if there is an access available, there should't be a charge for it. : : I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. At least I will. : Seems like Beverly Claypool Casella is the one to ask about Infocon and the fees charged. Seems the county gets a cut.

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