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"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 ag
by 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 agoIn 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 agoIs 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 agoI 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©right=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??
- nullc 14y agoIn the US the metadata is almost certainly not copyrightable, no matter how laborious its creation was. A work must be creative to be copyrightable, and mere facts are not as a matter of law.
- MichaelSalib 14y agoDigitizing public domain articles is free now? Like, scanners are free and the people who operate them work for free? Isn't it better for a non-profit entity to digitize PD articles and make them available to the world at a reasonable price? Or would you prefer a world where JSTOR didn't exist and the only people who had access to most old PD documents where those who lived in major western cities near the biggest libraries?
- toomuchtodo 14y agoHow much does Wikipedia charge me to make a copy of an article? What is Wikipedia's annual burn rate?
- andreasvc 14y agoThere's a difference between volunteer-written Wikipedia articles and JSTOR documents curated by professional scholars; e.g., the latter are acceptable for citations.
- MichaelSalib 14y agoWikipedia scans and digitizes old paper articles? In all seriousness, have you ever tried digitizing old journals? It is fairly time consuming.
- malandrew 14y agoPersonally, I'd be fine handing over all journal publishing responsibilities to Google. The one great thing that Google has going for it is that many many many of the engineers there came from academia and understand the value of open access to information. I don't care if they run ads while they do so. It would be orders of magnitude better than the status quo.
- rayiner 14y agoI fail to understand how a for-profit corporation that sells your privacy to the $500 billion advertising/media/branding industry is a better steward of this information than a not for profit organization that simply charges a fee for their services.
- mjn 14y agoAfaict JSTOR makes public-domain works available on pretty similar terms as Google Books. They both make the works available free to the public (see http://about.jstor.org/service/early-journal-content http://about.jstor.org/service/early-journal-content), but they: 1) request that you don't remove their watermark/attribution; and 2) block mass downloading. I'd prefer a fully open, mass-download-ok option, but Google Books doesn't allow that either, and I don't see people railing against Google Books's lack of openness. JSTOR's non-public-domain works are a different story, but the journals are the most to blame for that; JSTOR is just a licensee. Pretty similar to Google Books in that case, too (Google will only let you see a "restricted preview" or "snippet view", depending on the work, because they don't own the copyright).
- visarga 14y agoJSTOR is a public domain exploiter. They milk it for money. Once we get a copy of the papers, we could distribute them free of charge. I'd like a more altruistic host for this content.
- mjn 14y agoJSTOR does distribute the public-domain papers free of charge. It's the post-1923 papers, which are copyrighted and which JSTOR doesn't own the copyright to, which are paywalled. I do think they could be more aggressively pro-access, but they're slowly moving in the right direction. That's not to say there can't be other scanning projects that aim to do a superior job, and I'd probably volunteer if there were a way I could be useful to such a project (I've spent some time at Distributed Proofreaders). But I don't see JSTOR as exceptionally evil, at least any more than Google Books is. Both are bringing more content online, in ways that are partly good and partly flawed.
- praxeologist 14y agoI don't remember ever landing at JSTOR and seeing a whole paper available free of charge. Every time it was asking for money.
- duaneb 14y ago> 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. As I see it, they've removed the majority of the barrier (i.e. actually tracking down a copy of the periodical or whatever). So you have to log in and deal with a watermark- calling that 'intellectual dishonesty' is stretching the term to its limits.
- politician 14y agoWhy are bulk downloads prevented when S3 Requestor-Pays buckets could deliver public domain content at $0.12/GiB? Why does a one-time salvage operation require a watermark - are they asserting a copyright?
- res0nat0r 14y agoExactly how is .12c/gb going to fund an operation that provides full text searches of academic journals which saw 74 million downloads in 2010? Does anyone chiming in who claims this info must be available for pennies per article actually have any evidence than an operation of this scale can be funded this cheaply? The costs to provide this service are not this simple and as cheap as you think.
- duaneb 14y ago> The costs to provide this service are not this simple and as cheap as you think. Exactly. I can't believe bandwidth is jstor's limiting costs.
- politician 14y agoAh, yeah, I think you've misunderstood the implications of what I've suggested; from your tone, I think you'll find a corrected interpretation both more and less radical. JSTOR sends messages into the marketplace that they are a faithful steward of the public domain, but knows that its TOS a) prevents unrestricted access to the public domain, and b) knows that a US Attorney will prosecute violations of that TOS as felonies requiring several years in prison; I argue that their speech does not match their actions and that this is dishonest. Aggravating this, the extreme negative consequences of taking them at their word (as Aaron did) is why I've selected to say that their actions probe the depths of intellectual dishonesty. Full-text search, like printing, is a value-added service. There is no reason to keep public domain works hostage by the threat of sending people like Aaron to jail for decades just so that they can offer FTS. If JSTOR wants to offer FTS or other services on the corpus of public domain works, let them charge for access to those services. An existence proof: arXiv offers bulk download access to the works in their repository (~490GiB) via Amazon S3 Requester-Pays buckets [1]. The requester is paying Amazon, not arXiv; so, arXiv doesn't earn "pennies per article", it earns nothing. Incidentally, arXiv also provides full-text search [3]. Let's talk about capacity planning. Let's guess that average size of a digitized journal article is 5 MiB, that comes out to ~361 TB, or $44,400 to stream from S3. The at-rest cost of those articles is far lower because there are far fewer articles than downloads (I don't have a number, but would you argue otherwise?). My proposal: JSTOR removes its watermarks and puts all public domain works and associated metadata into S3 Requestor-Pays buckets. They finance their operations by selling non-public-domain works and value-added services like FTS at a price the market will bear. Earnings made by restricting bulk access to public domain works is blood money. Watermarking these documents is confusing - no one seems to have answered my questions about whether they are claiming a new copyright. [1] http://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data_s3 http://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data_s3 [2] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=386 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=386 [3] http://arxiv.org/find http://arxiv.org/find