Public Notice Illinois's purpose is to provide "to the public every notice that appears in an Illinois newspaper."
It is free for the public to search individually, but automated scraping of the website is disallowed per their Terms of Use, which state you can "download or print individual pages of this site solely for your own personal, non-commercial use, provided you do not remove any trademark, copyright or other notice contained in such content. No other use is permitted."
PNI also offers a paid subscription service with additional features, which is $75 for 30 days, and is less per-month for longer terms.
I've recently been developing free & open source web scraping software, with the intent to provide a unified, searchable database of local news and government information.
I would love to add public notices to this database, but the PNI terms do not allow this, and I don't believe the law supersedes PNI's terms, though I am not a lawyer, and I don't know for sure.
I emailed my representative Sue Scherer asking "Would you consider legislation establishing a state-wide Public Notices Database?"
She responded "I understand and respect your concerns. This issue is an ongoing discussion."
This opininon piece is representative of Decatur Vote's views, expressed in Reed Sutman's words.
Full Email
The full email I sent was as follows:
Would you consider legislation establishing a state-wide Public Notices Database?
It is my understanding current law requires local government bodies to publish many notices in local newspapers, and a state-wide, publicly accessible database would be a great addition to that.
I've recently discovered https://www.publicnoticeillinois.com and would like to use software to scrape the website, but their terms & conditions do not allow this, and the law surrounding web scraping does not seem to be clear.
This limitation makes it impossible for a small outlet like mine to make government notices readily available to the public. I don't believe a single private database with limited access is in the public interest. I believe a public database could streamline transparency & accountability, and provide a lot more freedom to the public to aid in distributing government notices.
I understand something like this could reduce revenue for PNI, who charges $75 for a 30 day subscription. I believe the public benefit of a state-wide public database would outweigh the harm done to PNI's revenue. I believe such a law would also encourage innovation in this space, where innovation is currently not possible due to this database being private.