ACLU, NAACP sue over South Carolina ban on ‘scraping’ court records
Nate Raymond Reuters, March 30 2022
(Reuters) – The American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP filed a lawsuit on Wednesday challenging the South Carolina judiciary’s ban on the “scraping” or automated collection of data from publicly accessible online repositories of filings in the state’s courts.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Columbia, the NAACP’s South Carolina chapter, represented by lawyers at the ACLU, argued the ban had impaired its ability to help tenants facing eviction by timely identifying them and providing resources and affordable housing opportunities.
The South Carolina NAACP said it wanted to try to help address an eviction crisis in the state that disproportionately impacts Black renters by gathering and recording information from the court's Public Index that is publicly available.
But it said the terms of service for the Public Index, a county-by-county repository of legal filings, expressly prohibits using software to harvest data and the South Carolina Court Administration employed technical means to prevent it.
