Permanent PDF URLs and shorter URLs for opinions

[flooie]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Hi. I work for Free Law Project, which runs Courtlistener.com and we are having trouble scraping the tax court. The URLs generated are both longer than anything we've seen in any court before and they are impermanent, so that we can not provide direct links back to the documents for our users.

We would prefer not to change our db model just for the tax court.

Describe the solution you'd like I realize the longevity of the URLs generated are somewhat a symptom of the access and security parameters supplied by Amazon. Would it be possible to generate permanent URLS that don't expire? Or redirecting links?

Describe alternatives you've considered Are alternatives are changing our database and providing our users without direct links to the tax court. We keep backups in this case - but many users prefer direct links from the court.

Many thanks.

[flooie]

@mmarcotte I wanted reach back out and see if there was any movement or conversations around this one.

[flooie]

@mmarcotte

I wanted to provide a bit more context. Currently we designed our tool to use the public-api

https://public-api-green.dawson.ustaxcourt.gov/public-api/todays-opinions

Which lets us generate a URL, for example like the following one which is a combination of the URL + docket number + document ID (I think).

https://public-api-green.dawson.ustaxcourt.gov/public-api/21580-19/919cb4ce-fb26-4cb3-a0f3-a1a2f0e6927b/public-document-download-url

Calling this URL then returns a json object containing a key url with a direct link with something like the following.

https://app.dawson.ustaxcourt.gov/documents/919cb4ce-fb26-4cb3-a0f3-a1a2f0e6927b?AWSAccessKeyId=ASIA6IROMRYROTRPUJG5&Expires=1642529858&Signature=LYSSj89K6Qq6IaBBsXLXSu%2F%2BIDY%3D&x-amz-security-token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEMH%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FwEaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJHMEUCIQDG1klI2AGSgmL7xRwTGDrThsM4FkGS9hCf9E006V45zwIgA7enkrsbeZbuhRh1gtu5EfhRhgkiY4TNaRpGylXqmuEqowII2f%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FARABGgw5ODA0MjM1NzcxMjIiDD2qAFOboqjyuV7mryr3AZXi4lXyUvihvIJp5HNcTO4SpH31Urh5cx4JFN%2B7H7ZuQ1miXzDavNO2aS%2FURmpmpHvNebqDROLpfb45RHFuZ5kkqp62ylecPNjlfu%2BJTF3177Po0G7tiIKMefe7MWj7d6yt2aFm08rdlNOQQffUIt%2BpHYuJ6qXeRug2ekXVxeELLo%2BH5pPpy13yMHkImhKQB9FPmouvo0gCCsefDh71XYlkBwlu29DE2%2BP0pfv1Z84joAVn%2B6ra7yxztR9jZJPpjFUv%2FbiouHvHIXjAGGfbSNOefihN9tESramWU%2Fjt5L6WlXTvDPu9ymfYYpG6us30sIgsw7wbpl8wn9GbjwY6mgEvH%2FbMyD7ioHkxwUuGO44NFaCzJpoqLULehdChy6%2F6mR4N2bakdbQwZbrHBezhRzpj2A4L5bwCuSoWBgn0Qd2v1Ue9QSVVtLTZVB%2FqifD6BC8e0aVuYcRtxhxdH%2FbR%2BXmflusTJY6xRK7%2F5Gp0%2FTI5q1KsJj4F5%2Fa9aHWzilIBaYjB%2FPFJeGlaO18ip8PUe363LHuGLDMEzWEN

The expiration and signature parameters combined make the URL unusable for our users and for us. The length of the URL makes it incompatible with our DB and unique to court opinions posted online anywhere in the US I believe and the expiration makes them temporal.

We would very much appreciate your consideration in changing the AWS requirements placed on this documents. We have heard from users of our site that they have struggled to share documents from the tax court because of the URL patterns here.

Additionally, we strive to provide direct links to the original court document because many lawyers (and others) prefer that extra validation and knowledge that the document is genuine. Thank you again for your consideration. I look forward to your hearing from you.

cc @mlissner

[mlissner]

Hi, I'm the director at Free Law Project (where @flooie works as a developer). We're going to move forward providing content from the Tax Court, but I want to highlight that it will be the only court in the country that I can recall where we don't provide links to the original sources on the court website.

Since we started gathering court opinions back in 2009, having links to the original sources has been an important part of our work. It buttresses our assertion that we're an unbiased source of information, and it provides the original sources to our users if they ever have any doubts about our system or our non-profit organization.

We usually provide a widget like this on the opinions we host:

For the tax court, what we're going to do is just provide broken links (since no functional ones exist). Instead of providing the extremely long links as shown above, we'll trim them down to eliminate the security tokens, expiration dates, signatures, etc., and then provide the remainder to our users. To be clear: These links won't work unless this issue is fixed.

Our hope is that once this issue is fixed the stripped-down links we created in the meantime will magically start working. Of course, we have no way to know if that will be true, but it feels like the best chance we've got. If there's anybody at the court that knows what the fix for this issue will actually be, and whether our stripped links are the right solution, I'd love to have your input on this issue.

Finally, I want to just reiterate — since I know that Github issues are easy to miss — that we're really glad to see the new Tax Court website is up and running, but from our perspective, if every download is only available via a link that's designed to break, the website is really quite badly broken. As the creator of the world wide web said in 1998, Cool [links] don't change. :)

Thank you again.

[mlissner]

(Just a heads up so folks aren't too overwhelmed, I've invited a journalist and a legal tech founder to comment on this issue to note how it affects their work. I hope this isn't too much input for a Github issue. I'm just hoping that with more voices in the mix we can make this a priority if it's not already.)

[rawillis3]

seconding Mike Lissner's comment. as a journalist (not in his org), I want to be able to provide my readers a direct link to the decision under discussion. what we have in place right now is not stable. I am left with directing readers to the docket and telling them which document to look for. and in some cases (as I mentioned just now on another thread) even this does not work, because an entire docket might be sealed, including an otherwise public opinion.

[brettjanssen]

Another vote for this. I am the CTO of Blue J Tax, we really need to be able to provide direct links back to the source cases so that our users can self verify the authenticity of the cases and also send links of cases they find in our system to non-subscribers (clients, etc). Not having access to stable links is a real issue.

[flooie]

Just wanted to touch base back on this one.

[mlissner]

Hello, I'm curious if anybody from the court is able to respond to this issue. We love and appreciate your new system, but it makes it exceptionally hard to gather data from the court, affecting a bunch of different folks, as you can see in the comments.

It'd be great to at least know if this feature is planned or if there might be a timeline. At least that way we can plan things on our end. Thank you!

[rawillis3]

I should probably open a separate thread for this, but I also would like to know whether at some point we might get online access to motions and briefs, not just orders.

On 3/16/22, Mike Lissner @.***> wrote:

Hello, I'm curious if anybody from the court is able to respond to this issue. We love and appreciate your new system, but it makes it exceptionally hard to gather data from the court, affecting a bunch of different folks, as you can see in the comments.

It'd be great to at least know if this feature is planned or if there might be a timeline. At least that way we can plan things on our end. Thank you!

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[flooie]

@mmarcotte I wanted to come back and touch base on this. I've seen some great changes to the search pages on the court website but the lack of a permanent URL remains a hinderance to us and our users. It would be helpful to know if this is on the list of enhancements or not?