I know that I am a bit of a broken record on the subject, but the right of the public to access and copy the records is clear.

  Whether you copy the record by taking a pencil to paper and "abstracting" data of interest to you, or you have a photographic memory and carry an image of the record out in your mind, or you take a canvas to paint a copy of the document (as if they'd let you, but maybe they would), or you take a digital photo of the document while reviewing the case file matters little.  If you expect to use public resources (copy toner ink, paper and electricity to run the machine), you'll be charged for it.

  That many courts, federal and otherwise, are kind enough to make some of their case indices available on the internet, is great. 

  Heck, even private firms going into the court offices to copy the records in order to resell them is just fine by me.  Whether this is a circumstance of a research firm abstracting a single file at cost to one client, or a firm seeking to resell mass records online matters naught.  That firm must bear the cost of making the abstract or copies themselves and pass that cost on to their client(s) in order to be an effective long-term player in the economy. 

  The fact of the matter is that these public records already are public, and the cost of putting them online for everyone to download for free should be borne by private industry that can find an effective profit model for doing so, and not by our tax dollars, which is always an inefficient solutions which only ends up competing with the private sector.