A Significant Change to the Recorded Document Preview System

Beginning on Tuesday, 10/15/24, Doxpop will be changing our document preview system. The old approach of providing a scrolling "slice" of the document image so you could read a document without printing it was being abused by organizations who where taking snapshots of all of the pieces of a document and then electronically "taping" them together in order to avoid paying the copy fees that the Recorder and Registers offices collect.

To address this, we have been forced to provide only half of each page for visual inspection. We believe this is still enough for you to be able to confirm that you've found the right document before purchasing it, and to select the necessary pages in situations where you don't need the entire document. We recognize that this may not serve the needs of folks who want to read a document without purchasing it. That's a loss forced on all of us by bad actors.

We apologize to the honest people who just lost a nice feature due to the dishonest actions of a few. We didn't want to do this, but inaction would not be fair to the taxpayers who have to make up the shortfall when Recorders and Registers lose copy fee income to scammers. It's also not fair to force those of you who use our system professionally to compete with businesses that cheat in order to reduce their costs in a manner that honest business people don't.

Follow-up, added 10/17/24:

We've received a lot of negative feedback on this change. This is not entirely unexpected, because we didn't want to make this change either. We invested quite a bit in the previous "sliding pane" preview and were proud of how it provided people with the ability to read documents without purchasing a copy. We thought it was a great solution, and only stopped using it because we were forced to. 

I'll follow up directly with every person who provided contact information in a comment or email. Anonymous comments won't show up on this blog, and of course I have no way to reach you if you made an anonymous comment, so I'll try to address some of those comments here:

First, this change was not made to increase Doxpop's income. We pass along the copy fees directly to the Recorders offices. The only upcharge is on extremely low volume accounts where we charge more than the $1 fee in order to cover transaction costs and not take a loss on small purchases. The vast majority of our users pay $1/page, which all goes to the Recorder. Copy fees are essentially a revenue neutral pass-through for Doxpop.

We don't make the rules, but we have have to follow them. A couple of folks expressed anger that they have to pay copy fees at all and wonder if we and the Recorder should be allowed to do this. The answer is that we're not only allowed, we're required to charge this fee. A copy fee for Recorded Documents has been required by legislation for decades and because the revenue from copy fees has long been a reliable part of every Recorder's budget, all counties allocate less tax funding to Recorder's offices. Eliminating the fee is not something Doxpop or a Recorder can just decide to do. It would require a restructuring of funding in every county and almost certainly an act of the State legislature.

Yes, there really are people who made the effort to write a program to download all of the little pieces in our sliding pane preview system to avoid paying copy fees. We responded to solid evidence, not a vague worry. Doxpop was fortunate enough to catch this early so we can prevent serious abuse. One of our competitors who didn't take strong action previously had hundreds of thousands of pages of images stolen from their Recorder partners through a similar hack, and we've learned from their unfortunate experience. We don't have the option to just ignore theft, because we are contractually obligated to prevent theft and collect the copy fees for every image that is provided through our system.

There is one positive aspect to this... The businesses stealing images are competing with legitimate businesses that follow the rules and pay for copies. That means many of you have been subjected to unfair competition in the past. This puts a stop to that in the counties we work with.

Are there other options? Maybe... That's why I'll be following up with anyone who provides contact information and is open to a positive discussion.

Doxpop can't ignore theft, and we can't change the rules we work under. However, we are open to any creative ideas to make our system meet your needs given those restrictions.

For instance, if changing the area that is blurred on each page can be done in a way that reveals most useful information without allowing theft of the image, we will certainly be willing to adjust that.

There might be ways to provide better access for local users who are willing to sign a contract with substantial penalties for theft. We are not willing to put ourselves in a position where we have to be constantly chasing miscreants in court, but anything short of that is on the table.

Footnote on terminology: I've used the term "Recorder" above to refer to both Indiana Recorders and Michigan Registers of Deeds. These offices with slightly different names operate in roughly the same manner in both States.