4 ms·

An offense worthy of a year or more in prison? Indeed we'll have to agree to disagree. Moreover, there's a distinction between principled activism and garden-va

by gruseom 14y ago

An offense worthy of a year or more in prison? Indeed we'll have to agree to disagree. Moreover, there's a distinction between principled activism and garden-variety crime, the ability to observe which is surely one of the criteria for a civilized society.

tptacek 14y ago
Anonymously downloading the entire contents of JSTOR so that you can publish it on a file sharing network and thereby destroy its commercial value is not principled activism; it's ends-justifies-the-means activism.
- gruseom 14y ago
  Do we know for sure what his intent was? Anyway, yes we can argue about the distinctions here, but I suspect we agree that for prosecutors rigidly to refuse to consider any of them at all ("theft is theft") was abusive.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    We have some evidence, because he wrote a manifesto.
    - gruseom 14y ago
      Interestingly, Lessig explicitly dismisses the theory that Swartz was trying to "liberate" the JSTOR archive: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/13/01/aarons-law/267247/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/13/01/aarons-law...
      - tptacek 14y ago
        Isn't it a little odd that Lessig doesn't mention the manifesto? It wasn't obscure, and was introduced by the prosecution as evidence.
        gruseom 14y ago
        You're right. It is odd.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  > downloading the entire contents of JSTOR so that you can publish it on a file sharing network and thereby destroy its commercial value It seems implausible to me that publishing the contents of JSTOR in such a way would actually destroy any substantial amount of JSTOR's value. What university would actually drop their JSTOR subscription in favour of a bunch of unlicensed PDFs they torrented? JSTOR, in addition to keeping you on the right side of copyright law, gives you all their systems for querying their data, and keeps itself up to date. Maybe a university in a developing country would drop their subscription, but any in the US? I find it unlikely. Such a torrent would be far more useful to an individual who didn't have access to an organization that subscribed. However it seems these pay-per-download fees only account for a fraction of a percent of JSTOR's operating budget (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064408 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064408). So it looks like there is some feasible harm there, but by no means destroyed commercial value.

by gruseom 14y ago

tptacek 14y ago

Anonymously downloading the entire contents of JSTOR so that you can publish it on a file sharing network and thereby destroy its commercial value is not principled activism; it's ends-justifies-the-means activism.

gruseom 14y ago
Do we know for sure what his intent was? Anyway, yes we can argue about the distinctions here, but I suspect we agree that for prosecutors rigidly to refuse to consider any of them at all ("theft is theft") was abusive.
- tptacek 14y ago
  We have some evidence, because he wrote a manifesto.
  - gruseom 14y ago
    Interestingly, Lessig explicitly dismisses the theory that Swartz was trying to "liberate" the JSTOR archive: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/13/01/aarons-law/267247/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/13/01/aarons-law...
    - tptacek 14y ago
      Isn't it a little odd that Lessig doesn't mention the manifesto? It wasn't obscure, and was introduced by the prosecution as evidence.
      - gruseom 14y ago
        You're right. It is odd.
jlgreco 14y ago
> downloading the entire contents of JSTOR so that you can publish it on a file sharing network and thereby destroy its commercial value It seems implausible to me that publishing the contents of JSTOR in such a way would actually destroy any substantial amount of JSTOR's value. What university would actually drop their JSTOR subscription in favour of a bunch of unlicensed PDFs they torrented? JSTOR, in addition to keeping you on the right side of copyright law, gives you all their systems for querying their data, and keeps itself up to date. Maybe a university in a developing country would drop their subscription, but any in the US? I find it unlikely. Such a torrent would be far more useful to an individual who didn't have access to an organization that subscribed. However it seems these pay-per-download fees only account for a fraction of a percent of JSTOR's operating budget (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064408 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064408). So it looks like there is some feasible harm there, but by no means destroyed commercial value.