7 ms·

His point is that the scholarly articles (like diamonds) can be easily tracked, and therefore determined if illegally sold or not. Since legitimate buyers - Uni

His point is that the scholarly articles (like diamonds) can be easily tracked, and therefore determined if illegally sold or not. Since legitimate buyers - University professors, etc - want to be sure they are on the up and up, the won't purchase illegally obtained goods. Therefore, there would have been no buyers for the articles "stolen".

Natsu 14y ago
Exactly. I can't believe that Aaron would have been able to sell them, even if he had intended to. And I can't seriously believe that he ever intended to, or that the prosecutors could have truly believed that he intended to. Yes, they are doing that themselves. But hopefully not for much longer if the internet has anything to say about that. I applaud all of the scientists who are working hard to make their research more open.
MichaelSalib 14y ago
That doesn't make sense. Imagine a world where Swartz managed to destroy JSTOR. A professor asks his grad students to read an article. They can either dig it out of the archival stacks and read it there or wait for interlibrary loan or...use a torrented copy or illegal DVD they bought on the street at their last academic conference. There is no way to track which one they did. No one will ever know. And no one will care: all the prof cares about is whether his students read the damn article; he doesn't care how they got it. He's completely focused on getting his research done, writing grant proposals, etc.
- smsm42 14y ago
  Swartz never intended to destroy JSTOR. He wanted to provide access to the articles (many of them, I'm sure, public financed and should be publicly accessible anyway) to people that do not have 50K/year to pay to JSTOR. That would by no way destroy JSTOR, but if the access to the storage could be provided much cheaper - in theory, if it would be possible to do all the functions of JSTOR without JSTOR - I see no reason why JSTOR should be sacred.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    > if it would be possible to do all the functions of JSTOR without JSTOR And spoilers: it's not. In order to make it would you would have to recreate everything JSTOR currently does, which would result in a JSTOR not called JSTOR. One with legal liability at that.
    - smsm42 14y ago
      It may very well be so, then the project of copying JSTOR would be marginal and would descend into oblivion without any external intervention.
  - MichaelSalib 14y ago
    With respect, the fact that he wrote the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto suggests that he did want to destroy JSTOR as a going concern. Now, maybe he didn't think releasing their archive would be enough, but he was clearly gunning for them. He wanted to provide access to the articles to people that do not have 50K/year to pay to JSTOR. That would by no way destroy JSTOR JSTOR prorates its fees so that poor institutions pay much less than rich institutions. And all of Africa gets JSTOR for free. Now, even individuals can get capped free articles from JSTOR. If the JSTOR archive was released to the world, why would journal owners continue licensing their content to JSTOR? Finally, do you understand that most of what JSTOR charges pays for either licensing the journal content (JSTOR doesn't own copyright for the journals it includes) or for scanning/digitizing new content? The costs that JSTOR charges pay for a hell of a lot more than a few web sites pushing PDFs to clients.
    - MichaelSalib 14y ago
      Wow, downvoters really don't want anyone to know about how JSTOR is free for institutions in Africa or prorates its costs for poorer institutions the world over! I wonder if Swartz, who was very concerned about information access in the global south (according to his manifesto), knew about that.
    - smsm42 14y ago
      >>>> If the JSTOR archive was released to the world, why would journal owners continue licensing their content to JSTOR? I'm not sure how this question makes sense. If the content that is accessible via JSTOR would be also accessible otherwise, which journal owners would withhold permission from JSTOR to publish their content? That's like saying if the book is available in the library, nobody would ever buy it. Obviously, it is not so. Also, surprisingly, in September 2011 JSTOR made public domain content available to everybody and shortly after that instituted free individual access programs - which they didn't do before, and which by your words should be impossible due to high costs that can not be supported in any other way but by charging for any access. Somehow it turned out to be possible still, and JSTOR did not collapse.

Natsu 14y ago

Exactly. I can't believe that Aaron would have been able to sell them, even if he had intended to. And I can't seriously believe that he ever intended to, or that the prosecutors could have truly believed that he intended to. Yes, they are doing that themselves. But hopefully not for much longer if the internet has anything to say about that. I applaud all of the scientists who are working hard to make their research more open.

MichaelSalib 14y ago

That doesn't make sense. Imagine a world where Swartz managed to destroy JSTOR. A professor asks his grad students to read an article. They can either dig it out of the archival stacks and read it there or wait for interlibrary loan or...use a torrented copy or illegal DVD they bought on the street at their last academic conference. There is no way to track which one they did. No one will ever know. And no one will care: all the prof cares about is whether his students read the damn article; he doesn't care how they got it. He's completely focused on getting his research done, writing grant proposals, etc.

smsm42 14y ago
Swartz never intended to destroy JSTOR. He wanted to provide access to the articles (many of them, I'm sure, public financed and should be publicly accessible anyway) to people that do not have 50K/year to pay to JSTOR. That would by no way destroy JSTOR, but if the access to the storage could be provided much cheaper - in theory, if it would be possible to do all the functions of JSTOR without JSTOR - I see no reason why JSTOR should be sacred.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  > if it would be possible to do all the functions of JSTOR without JSTOR And spoilers: it's not. In order to make it would you would have to recreate everything JSTOR currently does, which would result in a JSTOR not called JSTOR. One with legal liability at that.
  - smsm42 14y ago
    It may very well be so, then the project of copying JSTOR would be marginal and would descend into oblivion without any external intervention.
- MichaelSalib 14y ago
  With respect, the fact that he wrote the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto suggests that he did want to destroy JSTOR as a going concern. Now, maybe he didn't think releasing their archive would be enough, but he was clearly gunning for them. He wanted to provide access to the articles to people that do not have 50K/year to pay to JSTOR. That would by no way destroy JSTOR JSTOR prorates its fees so that poor institutions pay much less than rich institutions. And all of Africa gets JSTOR for free. Now, even individuals can get capped free articles from JSTOR. If the JSTOR archive was released to the world, why would journal owners continue licensing their content to JSTOR? Finally, do you understand that most of what JSTOR charges pays for either licensing the journal content (JSTOR doesn't own copyright for the journals it includes) or for scanning/digitizing new content? The costs that JSTOR charges pay for a hell of a lot more than a few web sites pushing PDFs to clients.
  - MichaelSalib 14y ago
    Wow, downvoters really don't want anyone to know about how JSTOR is free for institutions in Africa or prorates its costs for poorer institutions the world over! I wonder if Swartz, who was very concerned about information access in the global south (according to his manifesto), knew about that.
  - smsm42 14y ago
    >>>> If the JSTOR archive was released to the world, why would journal owners continue licensing their content to JSTOR? I'm not sure how this question makes sense. If the content that is accessible via JSTOR would be also accessible otherwise, which journal owners would withhold permission from JSTOR to publish their content? That's like saying if the book is available in the library, nobody would ever buy it. Obviously, it is not so. Also, surprisingly, in September 2011 JSTOR made public domain content available to everybody and shortly after that instituted free individual access programs - which they didn't do before, and which by your words should be impossible due to high costs that can not be supported in any other way but by charging for any access. Somehow it turned out to be possible still, and JSTOR did not collapse.