"This may seem weird but the government can't do it for free either. Do you think PACER (or something like it) would run itself with no resource investment whatsoever?"
PACER often runs revenues near 100 million. I'd do it at-cost. They are supposed to be doing it at cost.
"The laws themselves can be found online (Gov't Printing Office, the Library of Congress's THOMAS, even the House of Representative has a legal code lookup website)."
THOMAS is often quite slow in publishing. Often slow enough to be useless if you wanted to get info about a current bill. Their XML format is missing useful info in a lot of cases, like "dates", despite it being in the schema (I even know why, but i'll save that for a Daily WTF episode some day).
For example, the floor amendments to "Obamacare" were not on THOMAS until many months after the bill had been passed.
GPO still wants to charge for a lot of the data.
FWIW: As someone who delves into these systems a lot:
The whole lot of them are built to look, to a casual outsider, like they provide good, timely information.
To anyone who actually has tried to get this data from them: they don't.
Even govtrack, which is what people really use to get bill info because of the above, scrapes HTML pages and assembles data from multiple sources, because the single sources that are supposed to be providing it, don't.
PACER often runs revenues near 100 million. I'd do it at-cost. They are supposed to be doing it at cost.
"The laws themselves can be found online (Gov't Printing Office, the Library of Congress's THOMAS, even the House of Representative has a legal code lookup website)."
THOMAS is often quite slow in publishing. Often slow enough to be useless if you wanted to get info about a current bill. Their XML format is missing useful info in a lot of cases, like "dates", despite it being in the schema (I even know why, but i'll save that for a Daily WTF episode some day).
For example, the floor amendments to "Obamacare" were not on THOMAS until many months after the bill had been passed.
GPO still wants to charge for a lot of the data.
FWIW: As someone who delves into these systems a lot: The whole lot of them are built to look, to a casual outsider, like they provide good, timely information.
To anyone who actually has tried to get this data from them: they don't.
Even govtrack, which is what people really use to get bill info because of the above, scrapes HTML pages and assembles data from multiple sources, because the single sources that are supposed to be providing it, don't.