5 ms·

I don't fully understand the logic. Even if the underlying content is free, how are JSTOR scans public domain? If Google spends millions of dollars scanning i

by equark 15y ago

I don't fully understand the logic. Even if the underlying content is free, how are JSTOR scans public domain? If Google spends millions of dollars scanning in public domain books, I don't see how that gives Bing the right to download them all from Google unless given permission. It also seems we all benefit from allowing companies to invest in scanning public domain works since for whatever reason nobody is doing this by hand now.

meow 15y ago
I think the title is kind of wrong. The torrent author says: "I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who profit from controlling access to these works." So he clearly says its not in public domain but from a moral point of view they should be available to all the masses. The description of the torrent is very interesting. Definitely worth taking a look even if not willing to download the actual torrent.
- microarchitect 15y ago
  The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some 18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data. I think this statement means that the documents are indeed in the public domain. I also think equark makes a valid point about the scans. Further, I don't understand why these guys are going after JSTOR, a non-profit organization. I'd be more understanding of their methods if they went after somebody like Elsevier.
  - beefman 15y ago
    What do profits have to do with it?
  - meow 15y ago
    You are correct. This portion appears to be in public domain (though not publicly available). Non-profit or not, the fact remains that most of these documents remain behind pay-walls while still being considered to be in public domain. You have a valid point though. The access to these documents seem to be governed by agreements between various publishers with aim to share the published content among various institutions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR). So there is no point blaming JSTOR for the lack of access.
- bryanlarsen 15y ago
  You missed the word "unjust" in your reading. He very clearly claims elsewhere in his manifesto that the documents are public domain. The statement you elided would then be in conflict with that, but only if you remove the word "unjust".
  - Andrew_Quentin 15y ago
    They are in the public domain in a printed copy. You can copy from them, reprint them, make books of them and charge for it. You can scan them and put them online, the whole millions of them. Yet that does take work and who should pay for this work? Is it not a great service to mankind that these documents are being made available from the comfort of your home? I do not understand one simle thing. JSTOR is not for profit. Are people therefore saying that it is making a profit? If yes, the action is understandable, but if not, as much as I am and was anoyed to face a JSTOR paywall and as much as there is an argument to make such paywall means tested, what are people actually saying? That this non profit organisation should not be able to existantially support itself? Yes, government should support it rather than spend money on wars, but, I simply do not understand why anyone would want to kill off a non profit organisation. How many of you are going to read these articles? How many of the general population would want to read these articles? Save for the professors and students how many would seek to even attempt to go through a journal article. It just seems, frankly, that a self interested ideology of disdain for copyrights has sprung roots in Hacker News and man has stoped considering long term effects, focusing instead on their temorary pleasure of the now.
    - icebraining 15y ago
      >They are in the public domain in a printed copy. You can copy from them, reprint them, make books of them and charge for it. You can scan them and put them online, the whole millions of them. Yet that does take work and who should pay for this work? Whoever wants to. But doing so does not give you copyright over the content. >I do not understand one simle thing. JSTOR is not for profit. Are people therefore saying that it is making a profit? If yes, the action is understandable, but if not, as much as I am and was anoyed to face a JSTOR paywall and as much as there is an argument to make such paywall means tested, what are people actually saying? That this non profit organisation should not be able to existantially support itself? $19 per copy is extremely expensive, considering their expenses after the document is scanned are close to 0 (and as we can see, hundreds of people are willing to do it for free).
skizm 15y ago
Maybe I have misread but I believe he is saying that the scanning costs are negligible compared to what they are charging/making. He mentions that when the journals were in paper that the publishers charged just enough to keep their printing up and running but now they are getting greedy and making enough money to have political clout. Bottom line is that people shouldn't make so much money off the back of unpaid academics/scholars. Personally I feel like if they charged something like 99 cents for a DRM free version of each paper (with free abstracts still of course) this might be more reasonable. Just my take though :)
Palomides 15y ago
At least in the US, it seems the courts have decided that faithful reproductions of 2D art that is in the public domain themselves are not copyrightable. I suspect this could apply here. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_...
_delirium 15y ago
Scans of public-domain work remain in the public domain under U.S. law, at least as currently interpreted. There's no Supreme Court decision on the subject, but the leading case widely followed is Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel (1999) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_...) Access to network resources is another matter--- Bing might be violating Google's access policies if they slurped Google Books, especially if they evaded rate limits or ignored robots.txt. But they wouldn't be in violation of any copyrights. This makes it a bit of a cat-out-of-the-bag situation. If I download a copy of an 1878 journal from JSTOR, and email it to a friend, I'm violating JSTOR's terms of service. But if my friend turns around and posts the PDF online, he is not breaking any laws. A similar situation holds with U.S. government classified documents. Whoever leaked the Pentagon Papers broke the law, and could be prosecuted for the leak. But once they were out, as public-domain government documents, it was not illegal for third parties to republish them.
jcarreiro 15y ago
The works are in the public domain. Unless you think that simply scanning and producing a bit-for-bit accurate copy of a work in the public domain produces a new work that deserves copyright protection?
nullc 15y ago
You appear to be advancing a sweat of the brow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow) theory of copyright— a view which is rejected by US law (the law in other places may be different). See Bridgeman v. Corel for an excellent example. Of course, I don't begrudge people who scan the ability to get paid for their work. But there are a great many ways to get paid which do not involve forever robbing from the public domain (because, of course, if they are able they will simply keep updating their scanned copies while locking the public away from the originals).
- equark 15y ago
  Very interesting. That's exactly what I was arguing. I don't quite understand where the line is though. For instance, why isn't Google Map information public domain? The locations of roads aren't copyrighted and Google's efforts to enter this information don't seem that different than compiling a phonebook.
  - nullc 15y ago
    Probably you don't understand where the line is because no one else is quite sure either. Most of the underlying information on Google Maps is public domain—road locations and physical features of the terrain are all uncopyrightable facts. What they claim copyright to are the map visuals: the particular style of drawing the maps, and the photographs they took. (though perhaps even that is debatable, since the photography is a robotic process) You should be able to take the Google data and extract everything uncopyrightable from it to draw your own maps. (And if you're interested in public maps, you should see the OpenStreetMap project.) But say you want to include some of the other things on Google Maps--place markers for hotels and restaurants, for example. Any one of them is an uncopyrightable fact: that's where it is. But what if you choose to mark the same collection of the same sorts of things that Google has marked--are you infringing on their copyright in the selection? The more you can make an argument that there was some original thought in the selection the harder it is to tell. US law is pretty clear on plain facts being ineligible for copyright, even if it took work ("sweat of the brow") to compile them. But copyright in things like collections of data is much less clear.
wnight 15y ago
Anyone has the right to download anything from anyone else. It's the content-provider's server and it's their job to tell it who it should and shouldn't give content to. Making content accessible is implicitly giving permission to download it. It's how the internet works, by design.

by equark 15y ago

meow 15y ago

I think the title is kind of wrong. The torrent author says: "I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who profit from controlling access to these works." So he clearly says its not in public domain but from a moral point of view they should be available to all the masses. The description of the torrent is very interesting. Definitely worth taking a look even if not willing to download the actual torrent.

microarchitect 15y ago
The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some 18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data. I think this statement means that the documents are indeed in the public domain. I also think equark makes a valid point about the scans. Further, I don't understand why these guys are going after JSTOR, a non-profit organization. I'd be more understanding of their methods if they went after somebody like Elsevier.
- beefman 15y ago
  What do profits have to do with it?
- meow 15y ago
  You are correct. This portion appears to be in public domain (though not publicly available). Non-profit or not, the fact remains that most of these documents remain behind pay-walls while still being considered to be in public domain. You have a valid point though. The access to these documents seem to be governed by agreements between various publishers with aim to share the published content among various institutions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR). So there is no point blaming JSTOR for the lack of access.
bryanlarsen 15y ago
You missed the word "unjust" in your reading. He very clearly claims elsewhere in his manifesto that the documents are public domain. The statement you elided would then be in conflict with that, but only if you remove the word "unjust".
- Andrew_Quentin 15y ago
  They are in the public domain in a printed copy. You can copy from them, reprint them, make books of them and charge for it. You can scan them and put them online, the whole millions of them. Yet that does take work and who should pay for this work? Is it not a great service to mankind that these documents are being made available from the comfort of your home? I do not understand one simle thing. JSTOR is not for profit. Are people therefore saying that it is making a profit? If yes, the action is understandable, but if not, as much as I am and was anoyed to face a JSTOR paywall and as much as there is an argument to make such paywall means tested, what are people actually saying? That this non profit organisation should not be able to existantially support itself? Yes, government should support it rather than spend money on wars, but, I simply do not understand why anyone would want to kill off a non profit organisation. How many of you are going to read these articles? How many of the general population would want to read these articles? Save for the professors and students how many would seek to even attempt to go through a journal article. It just seems, frankly, that a self interested ideology of disdain for copyrights has sprung roots in Hacker News and man has stoped considering long term effects, focusing instead on their temorary pleasure of the now.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    >They are in the public domain in a printed copy. You can copy from them, reprint them, make books of them and charge for it. You can scan them and put them online, the whole millions of them. Yet that does take work and who should pay for this work? Whoever wants to. But doing so does not give you copyright over the content. >I do not understand one simle thing. JSTOR is not for profit. Are people therefore saying that it is making a profit? If yes, the action is understandable, but if not, as much as I am and was anoyed to face a JSTOR paywall and as much as there is an argument to make such paywall means tested, what are people actually saying? That this non profit organisation should not be able to existantially support itself? $19 per copy is extremely expensive, considering their expenses after the document is scanned are close to 0 (and as we can see, hundreds of people are willing to do it for free).

skizm 15y ago

Maybe I have misread but I believe he is saying that the scanning costs are negligible compared to what they are charging/making. He mentions that when the journals were in paper that the publishers charged just enough to keep their printing up and running but now they are getting greedy and making enough money to have political clout. Bottom line is that people shouldn't make so much money off the back of unpaid academics/scholars. Personally I feel like if they charged something like 99 cents for a DRM free version of each paper (with free abstracts still of course) this might be more reasonable. Just my take though :)

Palomides 15y ago

At least in the US, it seems the courts have decided that faithful reproductions of 2D art that is in the public domain themselves are not copyrightable. I suspect this could apply here. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_...

_delirium 15y ago

Scans of public-domain work remain in the public domain under U.S. law, at least as currently interpreted. There's no Supreme Court decision on the subject, but the leading case widely followed is Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel (1999) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_...) Access to network resources is another matter--- Bing might be violating Google's access policies if they slurped Google Books, especially if they evaded rate limits or ignored robots.txt. But they wouldn't be in violation of any copyrights. This makes it a bit of a cat-out-of-the-bag situation. If I download a copy of an 1878 journal from JSTOR, and email it to a friend, I'm violating JSTOR's terms of service. But if my friend turns around and posts the PDF online, he is not breaking any laws. A similar situation holds with U.S. government classified documents. Whoever leaked the Pentagon Papers broke the law, and could be prosecuted for the leak. But once they were out, as public-domain government documents, it was not illegal for third parties to republish them.

jcarreiro 15y ago

The works are in the public domain. Unless you think that simply scanning and producing a bit-for-bit accurate copy of a work in the public domain produces a new work that deserves copyright protection?

nullc 15y ago

You appear to be advancing a sweat of the brow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow) theory of copyright— a view which is rejected by US law (the law in other places may be different). See Bridgeman v. Corel for an excellent example. Of course, I don't begrudge people who scan the ability to get paid for their work. But there are a great many ways to get paid which do not involve forever robbing from the public domain (because, of course, if they are able they will simply keep updating their scanned copies while locking the public away from the originals).

equark 15y ago
Very interesting. That's exactly what I was arguing. I don't quite understand where the line is though. For instance, why isn't Google Map information public domain? The locations of roads aren't copyrighted and Google's efforts to enter this information don't seem that different than compiling a phonebook.
- nullc 15y ago
  Probably you don't understand where the line is because no one else is quite sure either. Most of the underlying information on Google Maps is public domain—road locations and physical features of the terrain are all uncopyrightable facts. What they claim copyright to are the map visuals: the particular style of drawing the maps, and the photographs they took. (though perhaps even that is debatable, since the photography is a robotic process) You should be able to take the Google data and extract everything uncopyrightable from it to draw your own maps. (And if you're interested in public maps, you should see the OpenStreetMap project.) But say you want to include some of the other things on Google Maps--place markers for hotels and restaurants, for example. Any one of them is an uncopyrightable fact: that's where it is. But what if you choose to mark the same collection of the same sorts of things that Google has marked--are you infringing on their copyright in the selection? The more you can make an argument that there was some original thought in the selection the harder it is to tell. US law is pretty clear on plain facts being ineligible for copyright, even if it took work ("sweat of the brow") to compile them. But copyright in things like collections of data is much less clear.

wnight 15y ago

Anyone has the right to download anything from anyone else. It's the content-provider's server and it's their job to tell it who it should and shouldn't give content to. Making content accessible is implicitly giving permission to download it. It's how the internet works, by design.