7 ms·

Here, the government is pursuing criminal charges for someone who has taken research papers (funded, by and large, through public research grants) to presumably

Here, the government is pursuing criminal charges for someone who has taken research papers (funded, by and large, through public research grants) to presumably make them available to the public. In doing so, he wronged various publishers, who have not financially supported any research, who have not financially supported the scientific review of said research, who have financially gained by (likely) not only charging the original author for the submission but also the universities which provided the infrastructure critical to the majority of research. Spearheading this noble effort to right the wrong and restore law and order is US attorney Carmen Ortiz, who is cited for the wise words: "Stealing is stealing". Lets be reasonable here: a decently sized server farm could probably keep the entirety of documents hosted on JSTOR in RAM. Today alone, imgur burned through 50TB of traffic; it delivers a petabyte a week. I'm not going to believe a sob story about how distributing 100KiB PDFs to someone running 'wget -r' is DoSing their systems.

jrockway 14y ago
But he recklessly damaged a protected computer. They're going to have to replace the fifty cent lock with a new fifty cent lock. That will cost over fifty US cents! (Yes folks, it's true: pretty much everything is a federal felony if someone doesn't like you.)
- jonursenbach 14y ago
  Add in beaucratical paperwork, a multitude of companies bidding the lowest price to replace said lock and the salaries of the team of people who are going to be spending the next 2 years replacing it and it really starts to add up.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - Zuider 14y ago
    Well, the article does note that the documents were 'returned'... >The indictment alleges that Swartz, at the time a fellow at Harvard University, intended to distribute the documents on peer-to-peer networks. That did not happen, however, and all the documents have been returned to JSTOR. Should I infer from this that they were found by the swat team in a bag labeled 'Swag'?
brucehart 14y ago
Not only that but I believe JSTOR has settled with Aaron Swartz and is not pressing for further prosecution.
- bo1024 14y ago
  One of the most important points. The only party you could really claim was "injured", does not want any further prosecution.
  - adgar 14y ago
    People don't press charges for lots of reasons. You are picking one and ignoring all the rest because it fits comfortably in your worldview. it must be nice to put your mind on cruise control.
    - bo1024 14y ago
      Their own statement at the time said: > “The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office,” said a statement released by JSTOR on July 19. “It was the government’s decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR’s. As noted previously, our interest was in securing the content. Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter.” http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N30/swartz.html http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N30/swartz.html unfortunately, the full statement link on their site is no longer live.
      - adgar 14y ago
        > Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter. All that says is "we're not pressing charges." You've added nothing to the discussion!
eli 14y ago
Hey, look, I'm a big fan of civil disobedience against unjust laws. But that typically means you get arrested.
- fauigerzigerk 14y ago
  Yes and hopefully it also means that many people take note and speak up against the law and against his harsh treatment. And this is not just about the law by the way. The fact that governments around the world can be blackmailed or corrupted by a small number of ruthless publishers is a political issue as well. It's also a credibility issue for researchers to some degree, particularly those who have already made a name for themselves and still play along with this.
kyboren 14y ago
I completely agree with you. However, he did 'break into' an MIT switch closet to run 'keepgrabbing.py' over a 1Gbit/s connection. He wasn't just downloading 100KiB PDFs, either. He downloaded at least two million documents. The indictment isn't clear exactly how many, and it sounds like he downloaded a lot more than 2 million, to boot. Not all of JSTOR's documents are neat 100KiB PDFs, either: a substantial portion are scanned images (1+ MiB PDFs) from old journals. So, we're looking at the TB range of data. This is not to say that his intentions were ignoble...
- nl 14y ago
  He downloaded at least two million documents. So there is at least 2 million scientific documents that publishers are profiting from withholding. I'm not generally anti-copyright, but I believe the profits publishers make on scientific publishing are unconscionable - not only do they impede progress, but in many cases (eg, medical research) they cost lives.
calpaterson 14y ago
> Lets be reasonable here: a decently sized server farm could probably keep the entirety of documents hosted on JSTOR in RAM. One largeish science publisher I worked with had 9-10TB of (pdf) document data. In addition to that there's a search engine, and image versions (of everything) to allow for look inside. Then there's dynamically generated HTML for online view. Electronic publishers do with large amounts of data and it isn't wholly static content. I don't know much about JSTOR but I think it's safe to assume that the implementation is non-trivial.
- mbell 14y ago
  10TB isn't a large amount of data. I have more data than that sitting in my $1500 home NAS.
  - calpaterson 14y ago
    I was trying to make the point that there is more to being a publisher than just holding static content.
    - mbell 14y ago
      As a business, sure. But I don't see the complication on the tech side. Getting the scanned copies is likely the most complex portion of this and is outside the realm of the site. The rest is just displaying static content and filling a Solr cluster with OCR data for search which is a trivial task with off the shelf OSS tools. Seems like a 2 week MVP project given how clunky the website is (why on earth does it move to the top of the page when I click the 'next' arrow when viewing the article, arg).
- Zigurd 14y ago
  I believe Swartz's point is that 10TB of data is not something you can build a self-perpetuating bureaucracy around, anymore, and that this implementation is, in fact, simple enough that it can be made available and maintained for a tiny fraction of the cost of JSTOR.
geofft 14y ago
Here, the government is pursuing criminal charges for someone who broke into locked facilities and committed a textbook case of computer fraud to do something that might be morally defensible. If he weren't illegitimately accessing these articles, it'd be a different story. If you have a tip about an unsolved murder that you want to report anonymously, and you break into someone's house to do so, good on you for reporting the tip, but you still broke into someone's house.
- Zigurd 14y ago
  Are you suggesting the case against Swartz is as serious as a burglary in Cambridge, Massachusetts? Or less serious, since he did not damage a lock or deprive the owner of the use of anything? Or is your argument that this is legitimately a high-profile federal case?
ig1 14y ago
Academics are completely free to submit their papers to open access journals, the reason they don't do so is because they want the brand value from publishing in prestigious closed-access journals and because submitting to those journals is free. Building that brand value has risks and cost money to produce (due to editorial, etc costs) hence the publishers need to recoup that value. Open-access journals to recoup that cost either charge the authors or rely upon a subsidies from wealthy benefactors (universities, industrial sponsors).
- pmb 14y ago
  There are no editorial costs. Editors are not paid. There are no authorial costs. Authors are not paid. There are a few copy-editing costs. Copy-editors get paid a few hundred bucks per article. There are a few administrative costs. The administrators get paid huge amounts. There is also no risk - the journals were set up a long time ago, and are the way they are due to inertia. If you imagine for-profit academic journal publishers (especially Elsevier) as anything other than vicious monopolists defending their entrenched positions via copyright law and extortion of university libraries, then you have the wrong idea.
  - alttag 14y ago
    > There are a few administrative costs. The administrators get paid huge amounts. I'll step over the part about these sentences contradicting each other. A colleague of mine worked as a part-time "managing editor" for the top journal in his field, meaning he was paid to coordinate the flow of submissions to the (unpaid) senior editors, managing the responsibilities/schedule of the editor-in-chief, and a host of other work I haven't quizzed him about. He worked hard, and for not much money, which is somewhat reasonable, as he was effectively an executive assistant. The EIC is expected to regularly travel to annual conferences (in one case, because that's when the journal's editorial board meets), so these costs are paid by the journal (to my understanding). He also does a great deal of evangelist work for the journal internationally. While some of these costs may be paid by honorariums (I'm not clear), they must be paid by somebody, and the journal is a likely candidate for a portion of those costs. My point is that every time we talk about costs of journals, someone mentions either a) administration is a no cost event or b) administration is an overpriced event. Yes, the reviewing and editing is typically performed by volunteers (the costs of which are borne by their respective employers) There is a substantial amount of work that goes on behind the scenes. I've had only the slightest of peeks behind the curtain, and I'm blown away by how much occurs that I wouldn't have initially guessed. I'm not saying the repository companies (and some publishers) are not money-grubbing parasites; I'm not sure the evidence is in their favor. But little though it's been, my limited view of journal administration is that it's a non-trivial set of tasks costing more than I originally suspected. Claiming otherwise without experience to the contrary is really just FUD.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

jrockway 14y ago

But he recklessly damaged a protected computer. They're going to have to replace the fifty cent lock with a new fifty cent lock. That will cost over fifty US cents! (Yes folks, it's true: pretty much everything is a federal felony if someone doesn't like you.)

jonursenbach 14y ago
Add in beaucratical paperwork, a multitude of companies bidding the lowest price to replace said lock and the salaries of the team of people who are going to be spending the next 2 years replacing it and it really starts to add up.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- Zuider 14y ago
  Well, the article does note that the documents were 'returned'... >The indictment alleges that Swartz, at the time a fellow at Harvard University, intended to distribute the documents on peer-to-peer networks. That did not happen, however, and all the documents have been returned to JSTOR. Should I infer from this that they were found by the swat team in a bag labeled 'Swag'?

brucehart 14y ago

Not only that but I believe JSTOR has settled with Aaron Swartz and is not pressing for further prosecution.

bo1024 14y ago
One of the most important points. The only party you could really claim was "injured", does not want any further prosecution.
- adgar 14y ago
  People don't press charges for lots of reasons. You are picking one and ignoring all the rest because it fits comfortably in your worldview. it must be nice to put your mind on cruise control.
  - bo1024 14y ago
    Their own statement at the time said: > “The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office,” said a statement released by JSTOR on July 19. “It was the government’s decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR’s. As noted previously, our interest was in securing the content. Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter.” http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N30/swartz.html http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N30/swartz.html unfortunately, the full statement link on their site is no longer live.
    - adgar 14y ago
      > Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter. All that says is "we're not pressing charges." You've added nothing to the discussion!

eli 14y ago

Hey, look, I'm a big fan of civil disobedience against unjust laws. But that typically means you get arrested.

fauigerzigerk 14y ago
Yes and hopefully it also means that many people take note and speak up against the law and against his harsh treatment. And this is not just about the law by the way. The fact that governments around the world can be blackmailed or corrupted by a small number of ruthless publishers is a political issue as well. It's also a credibility issue for researchers to some degree, particularly those who have already made a name for themselves and still play along with this.

kyboren 14y ago

I completely agree with you. However, he did 'break into' an MIT switch closet to run 'keepgrabbing.py' over a 1Gbit/s connection. He wasn't just downloading 100KiB PDFs, either. He downloaded at least two million documents. The indictment isn't clear exactly how many, and it sounds like he downloaded a lot more than 2 million, to boot. Not all of JSTOR's documents are neat 100KiB PDFs, either: a substantial portion are scanned images (1+ MiB PDFs) from old journals. So, we're looking at the TB range of data. This is not to say that his intentions were ignoble...

nl 14y ago
He downloaded at least two million documents. So there is at least 2 million scientific documents that publishers are profiting from withholding. I'm not generally anti-copyright, but I believe the profits publishers make on scientific publishing are unconscionable - not only do they impede progress, but in many cases (eg, medical research) they cost lives.

calpaterson 14y ago

> Lets be reasonable here: a decently sized server farm could probably keep the entirety of documents hosted on JSTOR in RAM. One largeish science publisher I worked with had 9-10TB of (pdf) document data. In addition to that there's a search engine, and image versions (of everything) to allow for look inside. Then there's dynamically generated HTML for online view. Electronic publishers do with large amounts of data and it isn't wholly static content. I don't know much about JSTOR but I think it's safe to assume that the implementation is non-trivial.

mbell 14y ago
10TB isn't a large amount of data. I have more data than that sitting in my $1500 home NAS.
- calpaterson 14y ago
  I was trying to make the point that there is more to being a publisher than just holding static content.
  - mbell 14y ago
    As a business, sure. But I don't see the complication on the tech side. Getting the scanned copies is likely the most complex portion of this and is outside the realm of the site. The rest is just displaying static content and filling a Solr cluster with OCR data for search which is a trivial task with off the shelf OSS tools. Seems like a 2 week MVP project given how clunky the website is (why on earth does it move to the top of the page when I click the 'next' arrow when viewing the article, arg).
Zigurd 14y ago
I believe Swartz's point is that 10TB of data is not something you can build a self-perpetuating bureaucracy around, anymore, and that this implementation is, in fact, simple enough that it can be made available and maintained for a tiny fraction of the cost of JSTOR.

geofft 14y ago

Here, the government is pursuing criminal charges for someone who broke into locked facilities and committed a textbook case of computer fraud to do something that might be morally defensible. If he weren't illegitimately accessing these articles, it'd be a different story. If you have a tip about an unsolved murder that you want to report anonymously, and you break into someone's house to do so, good on you for reporting the tip, but you still broke into someone's house.

Zigurd 14y ago
Are you suggesting the case against Swartz is as serious as a burglary in Cambridge, Massachusetts? Or less serious, since he did not damage a lock or deprive the owner of the use of anything? Or is your argument that this is legitimately a high-profile federal case?

ig1 14y ago

Academics are completely free to submit their papers to open access journals, the reason they don't do so is because they want the brand value from publishing in prestigious closed-access journals and because submitting to those journals is free. Building that brand value has risks and cost money to produce (due to editorial, etc costs) hence the publishers need to recoup that value. Open-access journals to recoup that cost either charge the authors or rely upon a subsidies from wealthy benefactors (universities, industrial sponsors).

pmb 14y ago
There are no editorial costs. Editors are not paid. There are no authorial costs. Authors are not paid. There are a few copy-editing costs. Copy-editors get paid a few hundred bucks per article. There are a few administrative costs. The administrators get paid huge amounts. There is also no risk - the journals were set up a long time ago, and are the way they are due to inertia. If you imagine for-profit academic journal publishers (especially Elsevier) as anything other than vicious monopolists defending their entrenched positions via copyright law and extortion of university libraries, then you have the wrong idea.
- alttag 14y ago
  > There are a few administrative costs. The administrators get paid huge amounts. I'll step over the part about these sentences contradicting each other. A colleague of mine worked as a part-time "managing editor" for the top journal in his field, meaning he was paid to coordinate the flow of submissions to the (unpaid) senior editors, managing the responsibilities/schedule of the editor-in-chief, and a host of other work I haven't quizzed him about. He worked hard, and for not much money, which is somewhat reasonable, as he was effectively an executive assistant. The EIC is expected to regularly travel to annual conferences (in one case, because that's when the journal's editorial board meets), so these costs are paid by the journal (to my understanding). He also does a great deal of evangelist work for the journal internationally. While some of these costs may be paid by honorariums (I'm not clear), they must be paid by somebody, and the journal is a likely candidate for a portion of those costs. My point is that every time we talk about costs of journals, someone mentions either a) administration is a no cost event or b) administration is an overpriced event. Yes, the reviewing and editing is typically performed by volunteers (the costs of which are borne by their respective employers) There is a substantial amount of work that goes on behind the scenes. I've had only the slightest of peeks behind the curtain, and I'm blown away by how much occurs that I wouldn't have initially guessed. I'm not saying the repository companies (and some publishers) are not money-grubbing parasites; I'm not sure the evidence is in their favor. But little though it's been, my limited view of journal administration is that it's a non-trivial set of tasks costing more than I originally suspected. Claiming otherwise without experience to the contrary is really just FUD.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]