Leave that problem for the next guy, a hard drive will give you five years before the bits go fuzzy. The federal courts' idea of favoring the Portable Document Format was a flawed effort to recreate paper in electronic form. For the venture to work, we needed to become electronic body and soul, not cling to memories of the paper world. That is, my message was accurate in a technological sense. Courts have yet to exploit the cost savings, collaboration and information sharing features of the Internet.
New media is still a blur to most courts.
However, the picture I painted is untrue due to cultural barriers to changing business practices in the courts. In some instances, there is concern about due process. Would litigants know what is happening to their rights, even liberty, when the documents are electronic, critics ask. At other times, the complaint is that computers don't make us any more productive as thoughtful people, only more busy and harried. Over the last decade, discussions of electronic court filing have moved from curiousity to planning for the inevitable.