If one terabyte hard drives had existed in George Washington’s day, all public records would be available for download. Instead, our forefathers put the deeds and real estate transaction histories in courthouses, which were the most easily accessible public places available at the time.

Keeping true to that principle is what should guide the Maine Supreme Judicial Court when it decides a case brought by six counties that want to keep the flow of electronic records to a trickle.

The case involves a business, MacImage, which intended to make public records even more public and accessible by putting them online. That would take some work on the company’s behalf, but it would expect to make a profit by charging users a fee, which many would gladly pay to avoid a trip down to the courthouse.

The records are public, but the counties are allowed to charge a reasonable fee to cover the costs they incur by making them available, but that is not what they are doing. The six counties, Androscoggin, Aroostook, Cumberland, Knox, Penobscot and York, responded that it would cost more than $1 million, based on the per-record fee that they would be collecting. But the company would not be taking the records out one at a time, but downloading already digitized material in bulk.

The purpose of the open records law is not to provide the counties with a revenue stream; it is to give the public access to public information. If some members of the public sell access to the information, that is nothing new. There is steady work for researchers who go into county courthouses and sell their services as title abstractors, which is no different than what MacImage intends to do.

MacImage says it will provide any hardware necessary for the download and will compensate the counties for any labor necessary to accomplish the job. That ought to be sufficient.

Just because the costs of getting a record from the county has always required the expense of fishing it out of a paper file doesn’t mean that those costs should remain the same as technology changes.

In keeping with the spirit that put records in the county courthouses to begin with, public records should be made as public as possible, and fees should reflect the real cost of providing them.