Recap is software which allows users to automatically search for free copies during a search in the fee-based online U.S. federal court document database PACER, and to help build up a free alternative database at the Internet Archive. It was created in 2009 by a team from Princeton University and Harvard University's Berkman Center.
Recap is available as a Mozilla Firefox add-on and Google Chrome extension. For each PACER document, the software will first checks if it has already been uploaded by another user to the Internet Archive. If no free version exists and the user purchases the document from PACER, it will automatically upload a copy to the Internet Archive, thereby building the database.
The Recap team uploaded 2.7 million documents Aaron Swartz had downloaded from PACER. These represented less than 1 percent of the documents in PACER.
PACER continued charging per page fees after the introduction of RECAP.
Some courts such as the District Court for the District of Massachusetts have explicitly stated that "fee exempt PACER users must refrain from the use of RECAP".