11 ms·

JSTOR Liberator sets public domain academic articles free

203 points by ryanwatkins 14y ago

ddrt 14y ago
So all it takes is a famous person killing themselves over prosecution and an insanely massive outcry from the internet. Seems easy enough. /s
- jacquesm 14y ago
  You are misreading the title. The jstor liberator refers to a bit of javascript, and the documents are freed up one-by-one as people run the script, apparently limited to once per browser. So it's not as if JSTOR suddenly saw the light of day and opened up their archive for download.
3327 14y ago
its a hack
3327 14y ago
the beauty is its only the beginning.
mindslight 14y ago
I feel kind of hollowish about this - I'd wondered at the time why Aaron chose such a direct method that was sure to piss off some people and get him burnt in some way. But everybody's got their own methods and goals, and he succeeded at the social goal of rallying people to his cause (something a purely technical solution has a very hard time doing). But now seeing an implementation of a tool that would liberate the same articles, a bit slower, but without him having to pay the ultimate price? Sigh.
kanzure 14y ago
I am trying to collect small hacks like this that are popping up. I know everyone writes scrapers, but hardly anyone talks about it. But maybe talking about it would be helpful so that we can figure out what goes right and what goes wrong: https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front Someone contributed a small greasemonkey script that does something similar to the JSTOR memorial liberator, except for SpringerLink previews. https://gist.github.com/4535401 https://gist.github.com/4535401
- merinid 14y ago
  You're right. everyone writes scrapers. Heck Google is just one huge scraper. It's what you do with the data (and in some cases, what you might intend to do with the data) that counts.
politician 14y ago
"By running the script ... a public domain academic article is downloaded to the user’s computer, then uploaded back to ArchiveTeam in a small act of protest against JSTOR's restrictive policies." -- Ars "At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content." -- JSTOR The contention that JSTOR is acting as a faithful steward of public domain works -- having established any sort of restriction or barrier to prevent the public from accessing those works -- truly examines the widths and depths and bounds of intellectual dishonesty.
- mistercow 14y ago
  In context, JSTOR's statement was clearly not about public domain works. It was about the articles that Swartz downloaded, most of which were presumably not in the public domain.
  - politician 14y ago
    Is that a distinction without a difference when their TOS restricts coordinated downloads of public domain content for the purpose of evading their artificial barriers? A TOS violation that carries, in the minds of some US prosecutors, a just penalty of several years in jail?
  - kanzure 14y ago
    I don't see any evidence either way for whether or not his "keepgrabbing" python soup only grabbed public domain articles. At the very least, I imagine it touched the landing pages for each article to get the pdf link, where it would also have an opportunity to look at the copyright status. Is the copyright status even on the JSTOR page for each article anyway? Or is it only in the PDF? Let's see.. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1831029 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1831029 The "rights and permissions" link goes out to: https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?author=Fischer+Black+et+al.&contentID=10.2307%2F1831029&copyright=Copyright+1973+The+University+of+Chicago&endPage=654&issueNum=3&numPages=18&orderBeanReset=true&publication=jpe&publicationDate=05%2F01%2F1973&publisherName=UCHP&startPage=637&title=The+Pricing+of+Options+and+Corporate+Liabilities&volumeNum=81 https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?author=Fischer... ... ok copyright.com is not encouraging at all, that scam is everywhere. Let's try something older. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30096268 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30096268 The "rights and permissions" link goes out to: https://www.copyright.com/openurl.do?sid=pd_ITHAKA&servicename=all&WT.mc_id=tpd_ITHAKA19334192&issn=00682454&date=1902 https://www.copyright.com/openurl.do?sid=pd_ITHAKA&servi... which leads to: http://www.copyright.com/search.do?operation=detail&item=122798479&detailType=basic http://www.copyright.com/search.do?operation=detail&item... .. where they seem to be selling the rights??
officemonkey 14y ago
I think it's entirely appropriate for those of us who have just learned of JSTOR to go visit it and check out the site. It's interesting because they allow you to download a single article for free. Once I download the public domain article from 1886, I suppose I could do whatever I wanted with it.
- aw3c2 14y ago
  Not necessarily. The old article ITSELF is public domain, the work, so to speak. The file you downloaded might have a new copyright because someone worked really hard to create it. Check the license and everything before jumping to conclusions.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Effort required to create something does not mean that something is necessarily copyrighted if there was no creative process involved. This is why databases are not copyright-able in the US. Is scanning old journals a creative process? Maybe there is some case law that says so, but until I see that, I am inclined to say no, and everything that I can find agrees. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#Reproductions_of_public_domain_works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#Reprod... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_....
  - officemonkey 14y ago
    I'll accept the concept of "new copyright" for something transformative, I do not accept it for something akin to xeroxing. If JSTOR has a different opinion, they can see me in court.
  - officemonkey 14y ago
    Oh, BTW, I looked at the JSTOR license for "Early Content Journals" and I'm confident that I am within the spirit and letter of their TOS. http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp#TC2 http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp#TC2
darkarmani 14y ago
Unfortunately, I can see this pounding JSTOR's site. I'm sure US Attorney Carmen Ortiz will think this is a DDoS attack because JSTOR can't handle the traffic generated by everyone going there. I'm sure she can rationalize that as a terrorist attack on essential infrastructure, so let's round it up to 170 years in jail for the conspirators. Let's assume every one of those connections would have paid $200 for an article,so that's $50 million in damages. Right?
- nwh 14y ago
  I can certainly see the site being impacted by a large number of concurrent visitors. The service embeds each PDF with the current datestamp, so every access is taking more server time than bandwidth. The response time on an example PDF for me was around 10 seconds.
- res0nat0r 14y ago
  Sigh. It is getting very old to see HN comments degenerating into Techdirt/Reddit/Torrentfreak level hyperbole any time a perceived injustice story is in the news and when it involves the US government, the entertainment industry or any other entity that isn't 100% in the "information wants to be free" boat.
  - darkarmani 14y ago
    You don't think the site could get slashdotted from everyone trying to use this bookmarklet at the same time and PDFs getting generated from it? At this point, I don't think it would be a stretch to see an overreaction, even if it's just benign traffic from people checking out the free content melt the servers.
    - Permit 14y ago
      There's a difference between 'The site may go down and 'This person I don't know will overreact and accuse us of terrorism'. Why don't we discuss the reality of the situation rather than some bizarre scenario you've concocted?
mjn 14y ago
I might be missing something, but how are the articles being liberated? I don't see any downloadable articles at archiveteam.org at all. Is the idea that they're going to be made available as a torrent or in some other downloadable form at a later date?
general_failure 14y ago
Just because something is in public domain doesn't mean it's free. Shakespear's works might be public domain but there is a cost to printing a book. There is a cost to scanning pages, there is a cost to hosting a website, administering a website etc. How hard is this logic to understand? If you don't want to use JSTOR don't use it. Don't go around saying they should let you download it for free.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  You can buy a copy of Shakespeare's works and then upload a copy of the text to Project Gutenberg. Just because someone is selling something that is public domain doesn't mean that you can't give it away for free.

203 points by ryanwatkins 14y ago

ddrt 14y ago

So all it takes is a famous person killing themselves over prosecution and an insanely massive outcry from the internet. Seems easy enough. /s

jacquesm 14y ago
You are misreading the title. The jstor liberator refers to a bit of javascript, and the documents are freed up one-by-one as people run the script, apparently limited to once per browser. So it's not as if JSTOR suddenly saw the light of day and opened up their archive for download.

3327 14y ago

its a hack

3327 14y ago

the beauty is its only the beginning.

mindslight 14y ago

I feel kind of hollowish about this - I'd wondered at the time why Aaron chose such a direct method that was sure to piss off some people and get him burnt in some way. But everybody's got their own methods and goals, and he succeeded at the social goal of rallying people to his cause (something a purely technical solution has a very hard time doing). But now seeing an implementation of a tool that would liberate the same articles, a bit slower, but without him having to pay the ultimate price? Sigh.

kanzure 14y ago

I am trying to collect small hacks like this that are popping up. I know everyone writes scrapers, but hardly anyone talks about it. But maybe talking about it would be helpful so that we can figure out what goes right and what goes wrong: https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front Someone contributed a small greasemonkey script that does something similar to the JSTOR memorial liberator, except for SpringerLink previews. https://gist.github.com/4535401 https://gist.github.com/4535401

merinid 14y ago
You're right. everyone writes scrapers. Heck Google is just one huge scraper. It's what you do with the data (and in some cases, what you might intend to do with the data) that counts.

politician 14y ago

"By running the script ... a public domain academic article is downloaded to the user’s computer, then uploaded back to ArchiveTeam in a small act of protest against JSTOR's restrictive policies." -- Ars "At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content." -- JSTOR The contention that JSTOR is acting as a faithful steward of public domain works -- having established any sort of restriction or barrier to prevent the public from accessing those works -- truly examines the widths and depths and bounds of intellectual dishonesty.

mistercow 14y ago
In context, JSTOR's statement was clearly not about public domain works. It was about the articles that Swartz downloaded, most of which were presumably not in the public domain.
- politician 14y ago
  Is that a distinction without a difference when their TOS restricts coordinated downloads of public domain content for the purpose of evading their artificial barriers? A TOS violation that carries, in the minds of some US prosecutors, a just penalty of several years in jail?
- kanzure 14y ago
  I don't see any evidence either way for whether or not his "keepgrabbing" python soup only grabbed public domain articles. At the very least, I imagine it touched the landing pages for each article to get the pdf link, where it would also have an opportunity to look at the copyright status. Is the copyright status even on the JSTOR page for each article anyway? Or is it only in the PDF? Let's see.. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1831029 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1831029 The "rights and permissions" link goes out to: https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?author=Fischer+Black+et+al.&contentID=10.2307%2F1831029&copyright=Copyright+1973+The+University+of+Chicago&endPage=654&issueNum=3&numPages=18&orderBeanReset=true&publication=jpe&publicationDate=05%2F01%2F1973&publisherName=UCHP&startPage=637&title=The+Pricing+of+Options+and+Corporate+Liabilities&volumeNum=81 https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?author=Fischer... ... ok copyright.com is not encouraging at all, that scam is everywhere. Let's try something older. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30096268 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30096268 The "rights and permissions" link goes out to: https://www.copyright.com/openurl.do?sid=pd_ITHAKA&servicename=all&WT.mc_id=tpd_ITHAKA19334192&issn=00682454&date=1902 https://www.copyright.com/openurl.do?sid=pd_ITHAKA&servi... which leads to: http://www.copyright.com/search.do?operation=detail&item=122798479&detailType=basic http://www.copyright.com/search.do?operation=detail&item... .. where they seem to be selling the rights??

officemonkey 14y ago

I think it's entirely appropriate for those of us who have just learned of JSTOR to go visit it and check out the site. It's interesting because they allow you to download a single article for free. Once I download the public domain article from 1886, I suppose I could do whatever I wanted with it.

aw3c2 14y ago
Not necessarily. The old article ITSELF is public domain, the work, so to speak. The file you downloaded might have a new copyright because someone worked really hard to create it. Check the license and everything before jumping to conclusions.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Effort required to create something does not mean that something is necessarily copyrighted if there was no creative process involved. This is why databases are not copyright-able in the US. Is scanning old journals a creative process? Maybe there is some case law that says so, but until I see that, I am inclined to say no, and everything that I can find agrees. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#Reproductions_of_public_domain_works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#Reprod... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_....
- officemonkey 14y ago
  I'll accept the concept of "new copyright" for something transformative, I do not accept it for something akin to xeroxing. If JSTOR has a different opinion, they can see me in court.
- officemonkey 14y ago
  Oh, BTW, I looked at the JSTOR license for "Early Content Journals" and I'm confident that I am within the spirit and letter of their TOS. http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp#TC2 http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp#TC2

darkarmani 14y ago

Unfortunately, I can see this pounding JSTOR's site. I'm sure US Attorney Carmen Ortiz will think this is a DDoS attack because JSTOR can't handle the traffic generated by everyone going there. I'm sure she can rationalize that as a terrorist attack on essential infrastructure, so let's round it up to 170 years in jail for the conspirators. Let's assume every one of those connections would have paid $200 for an article,so that's $50 million in damages. Right?

nwh 14y ago
I can certainly see the site being impacted by a large number of concurrent visitors. The service embeds each PDF with the current datestamp, so every access is taking more server time than bandwidth. The response time on an example PDF for me was around 10 seconds.
res0nat0r 14y ago
Sigh. It is getting very old to see HN comments degenerating into Techdirt/Reddit/Torrentfreak level hyperbole any time a perceived injustice story is in the news and when it involves the US government, the entertainment industry or any other entity that isn't 100% in the "information wants to be free" boat.
- darkarmani 14y ago
  You don't think the site could get slashdotted from everyone trying to use this bookmarklet at the same time and PDFs getting generated from it? At this point, I don't think it would be a stretch to see an overreaction, even if it's just benign traffic from people checking out the free content melt the servers.
  - Permit 14y ago
    There's a difference between 'The site may go down and 'This person I don't know will overreact and accuse us of terrorism'. Why don't we discuss the reality of the situation rather than some bizarre scenario you've concocted?

mjn 14y ago

I might be missing something, but how are the articles being liberated? I don't see any downloadable articles at archiveteam.org at all. Is the idea that they're going to be made available as a torrent or in some other downloadable form at a later date?

general_failure 14y ago

Just because something is in public domain doesn't mean it's free. Shakespear's works might be public domain but there is a cost to printing a book. There is a cost to scanning pages, there is a cost to hosting a website, administering a website etc. How hard is this logic to understand? If you don't want to use JSTOR don't use it. Don't go around saying they should let you download it for free.

jlgreco 14y ago
You can buy a copy of Shakespeare's works and then upload a copy of the text to Project Gutenberg. Just because someone is selling something that is public domain doesn't mean that you can't give it away for free.