Why Online Public Records Are Usually Not Free
July 7th, 2010
You’ve probably heard the phrase “public records,” but do you know what it means? Generally speaking public records are those records that the public can access without restriction (mostly). The disclosure is because the records were made open voluntarily, or because some government transactions or archives require this to be the case. Most of these records have personal or even private information within.
Government agencies at all levels, from local through state and even federal, keep public records. All of these records are supposed to be free because they were disclosed for the purposes of public access.
You have the right to access these records. Go to the agency in question, request the record you want, and wait for the response. In many cases the record will be found and you can have the information. In some cases you may be asked for a small fee, which will cover technical expenses.
Why do some online search sides charge you for access to these documents, then, if they are supposed to be free? There are several reasons.
First, some of these sites have paid the government to get the documents. They then charge you to cover their own costs.
On some other sites, the document is free but the search service isn’t. It costs a good bit of money to maintain a huge, complex database for you to search.
Suppose you need the information contained in a public record, but you don’t have a way to pay for the record. Don’t panic! You can always access public records for free online. Go to a major search engine, and search “public record access free sites.”
Your search will send you to some links to government agencies that make records available online. You’ll also find some websites that have smaller databases of records that are free to search. The databases will be smaller, though, than those that ask you to pay for their services.
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