There is a reason that public records are kept in courthouses.

It’s not because the records belong to the courts, and it’s not because county registries need a source of income.

Records like deeds and wills are in courthouse because they belong to the public, and in Maine’s early times, the county courthouses were the most public place they could be kept.

That goal of public access is at the crux of a lawsuit pitting a Maine business against county officials around the state over electronic access to deeds, currently stored in county registries.

For many years, businesses have sent abstractors to registries to research deeds and develop reports for sale to prospective property owners. The records are made available by the counties to anyone who wants to look through them, but a fee is usually charged to make copies.

John Simpson of MacImage of Maine wants to take it one step further and copy the counties’ entire databases, creating a service for real estate professionals who want to track sales.

Just like an abstracter who wants to Xerox a few pages, Simpson is prepared to pay a reasonable fee to cover the cost to the county to turn over the information.

But he was not prepared for the response that he got, which were prices that no business could afford. Androscoggin County quoted the price of $317,000 for a copy of its electronic records, Cumberland $300,000 and Penobscot County said that it would take $100,000 to make a copy of its microfilm. All together, the counties are asking for more than $1 million.

This seems excessive, considering the records are already stored in computers. While there are certain to be some costs associated with making a copy of an existing database, they are not likely to be anywhere near the figures that Simpson has been quoted.

He charges that the counties are trying to maintain a monopoly on the records and are limiting access to them. When you see the prices that they propose charging, he may be right.

Simpson’s case is now before a judge who will determine if the counties are meeting their responsibilities under the Freedom of Access law. We hope in deciding this case, the judge remembers why the records were put where they were in the first place.