Is sharing court documents a violation of copyright law?

The court-created documents provided by PACER are works of the federal government, and, under copyright law, are automatically placed in the public domain and may be shared without legal restriction.

The question is a little bit more complicated for documents filed by third parties, so we asked a prominent legal scholar about it. He told us that such documents may be under copyright, but he thought redistributing copyrighted court documents was legal under copyright's fair use doctrine. However, there is very little case law in this area (though some examples are here, here, and here). Like any legal question, it's impossible to be sure.

We believe citizens ought to have the freedom to share public court documents, and we fight for that right. We hope RECAP users will help to establish that precedent.

If filings can be copyrighted and cannot be shared under fair use, it will cause a massive upheaval in the legal ecosystem.