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JSTOR sells access to its archive for $50K/year. That seems pretty damn valuable. I think that if Swartz successfully released the JSTOR archive, their entire

JSTOR sells access to its archive for $50K/year. That seems pretty damn valuable. I think that if Swartz successfully released the JSTOR archive, their entire business would have withered and died. Once you can buy a DVD on the street for $3 that held the entire thing, it gets harder and harder for university libraries to justify paying $50K/year. Their customer base wouldn't dry up overnight but over a few years, you'd see library departments squeezed for cash (and they all are) killing their subscriptions. With JSTOR access drying up, grad students and professors would make do by torrenting or copying DVDs; it would be an open secret, a technically illegal but universally accepted practice. I don't think Swartz could have profited from this scheme, but he could have destroyed a large amount of financial value; JSTOR's a $50million/year organization.

jlgreco 14y ago
This is absolute bullshit. There is no way in hell any university in a developed nation would drop their subscription to JSTOR. JSTOR keeps them on the right side of copyright law, keeps itself up to date, and provides infrastructure that the vast majority of university users find essential. Individuals not affiliated with universities may find such a pirated collection useful, but such individuals currently make up a fraction of one percent of JSTOR's revenue.
- MichaelSalib 14y ago
  Journals in the library + interlibrary loan keep them on the right side of copyright law. And many more expensive subscriptions provide universities with access to parts of the JSTOR archive. What's more, there are no university copyright investigations to fear: no one is going to force grad students to prove that they legally obtained every paper they ever read (how could that even work?), but even if they did, grad students have a perfectly legal explanation: they can just say they read/acquired their documents from the library and no one can prove otherwise. Universities aren't stupid; they know there's no threat from dropping JSTOR and they can count to $50,000 all too well.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Unless the university library it itself providing a unified accessible system to access a torrented (and somehow constantly up to date?) archive of JSTOR, then JSTOR will not be dropped. You are having serious tunnel vision if you think all grad students and professors want to spend their time fucking around with that, or even know how to do that.
    - MichaelSalib 14y ago
      I know that every university, there are multiple servers where students share terabytes of pirated movies, TV shows and music. And every university already has a unified accessible non-JSTOR system for reading old journal articles: its called the journal stacks in the library basement + interlibrary loan. Everyone already knows how to deal with that: its just less convenient.
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        A university officially providing a pirated archive of JSTOR would be opening itself up to legal liability itself worth more than 50k. Add to that the cost of maintaining a digital archive comparable to JSTOR, the cost of training, and the cost of keeping it up to date, and you have to be absolutely insane or intellectually dishonest if you claim even a struggling school with limited resources would go with that. > I know that every university, there are multiple servers where students share terabytes of pirated movies, TV shows and music. You are being delusional if you think such a system is at all comparable to what it would take to replace JSTOR for all but a fraction of university JSTOR users. I was a technically inclined CS guy with far to much free time while in university and I would be royally pissed if my university had dropped JSTOR for some sort of ghetto fileshare with an aging torrent. Anyone a less ideal user than I would be crippled by that.
        MichaelSalib 14y ago
        As I wrote earlier, I don't think universities would ever provide a pirated archive. They wouldn't need to. Grad students talk. They pass around USB drives. And pretty soon, everyone has the archive on their laptop.
ucee054 14y ago
You NEED access to journals and conferences if you are silly enough to become a research student (like I did) or even sillier and become a professional researcher. Also, there is no way on earth you can pay for it on a researcher's salary or stipend. Hence, the Universities and Laboratories are BLACKMAILED into paying for it on the researchers' behalf. (So the 50K/year thing applies to MIT, Harvard and a couple of other "customers".) However, outside of that context, J. Random Hacker might quite like to read a paper - his taxes paid for it after all, and there are like 3 good papers in existence. But JRH would never pay 50K for it. He probably CAN'T; JRH might need to take out a mortgage to pay that much. So if you want to pretend that the 50K multiplies by the potential readership as "loss due to copyright theft", you are committing a basic economic fallacy, which is normally debunked in Econ101. So I advise you to drop the whole 50K/year argument.
- MichaelSalib 14y ago
  You NEED access to journals and conferences And you have them, in dead tree form at every big university. Universities functioned long before JSTOR. BLACKMAILED If you think this is blackmail, you don't know much. if you want to pretend that the 50K multiplies by the potential readership as "loss due to copyright theft" I don't believe that at all. My point was just that the archive has serious commercial value. If you can license access to an archive for $50K/year, then saying it has "little or no commercial value" is obviously wrong, right? J. Random Hacker might quite like to read a paper He can always go to his nearest university library and go spelunking in the archival stacks looking for it. his taxes paid for it after all His taxes paid for JSTOR to dig up the paper journal, scan the articles, and pay data entry folk to type in metadata? Really? I don't think so. But JRH would never pay 50K for it. $50K/year is not the only price point being offered. You could always pay for individual paper downloads or you can get them free now.
  - ucee054 14y ago
    Swartz's actions would have been an "attack" on a research archive, which the article classifies as having "little" commercial value (and Swartz wasn't profiting, it was civil disobedience). The Reuters news for yesterday lists the LIBOR scandal, which was an "attack" on financial data. The fine alone, for UBS alone, was $1.5Billion. Now that's what I call "serious commercial value". JSTOR, not so much. Do you want to keep arguing the point or do you feel silly enough already?
darkarmani 14y ago
> JSTOR sells access to its archive for $50K/year. That seems pretty damn valuable...I think that if Swartz successfully released the JSTOR archive, their entire business would have withered and died. JSTOR who declined to press charges is probably in the best position to value the damages Swartz inflicted.
betterunix 14y ago
1. There is no reason to think that any university or organization would have given up its JSTOR subscription because an archive was made available on BitTorrent. At the very least, universities would want up-to-date articles, and so anything published after the archive was amassed (which would be a large number in just a year's time) would still motivate a subscription. There is also JSTOR's search service, and the general support universities have for the copyright system (to the point of abandoning their own academic mission when copyrights force such a thing). 2. Why should we care if JSTOR goes out of business because an archive is published? If JSTOR's only value is in their ability to enforce other publishers' copyrights, then they should go out of business because human knowledge should not be restricted by copyrights. Copyrights only made sense for academic publications when we needed the publishing industry to make scholarly writing available on a widespread basis; in 2013, we have this thing called the Internet (perhaps you've heard of it) that is vastly more efficient and costs far less. So if JSTOR's search service is valuable, great, let's keep them around. If it is not, or if we can get the same thing without JSTOR (I suspect we could if we really tried), then we should let them and all the leeches whose publications they sell subscriptions to die quickly. Considering that a typical scientific journal publisher will not pay the authors of its articles, nor the reviewers, and often not even the editors, what exactly can they claim to be contributing to human knowledge to the point of justifying the continued restrictions on access to that knowledge that copyrights the publishers that hold them are imposing?
- MichaelSalib 14y ago
  anything published after the archive was amassed would still motivate a subscription For many journals, JSTOR doesn't have recent content available anyway; Universities typically subscribe to publishers to get electronic access to recent content while relying on JSTOR for access to older content. Why should we care if JSTOR goes out of business because an archive is published? It doesn't matter whether you care or not. But the law cares. Prosecutors care. Judges care. human knowledge should not be restricted by copyrights. You've decided that? Good for you! Do prosecutors and judges have to agree with that statement? What happens when they don't? Copyright is the law. You don't like that. I get it. But prosecutors and judges have to enforce the law as it is, not the law as some hackers on HN fervently wish it were. we have this thing called the Internet that is vastly more efficient and costs far less. This internet thing, that I've never heard of before (thanks for telling me about it!), does it make scanning and digitzing old paper journals free also? Does it make it so that data entry techs typing in metadata describing old paper journals don't have to paid? we should let them and all the leeches whose publications they sell subscriptions to die quickly How are we going to do that exactly? By not enforcing copyright laws or the CFAA, just for them? So, copyright laws will be enforced when it comes to stealing proprietary source code, but not for old journals? what exactly can they claim to be contributing to human knowledge I'm not sure I get your argument here. Is it that copyright law shouldn't be enforced because you've decided journal publishers are rapacious parasites (I think they are too actually)? Or that copyright law should only get enforced for entities that contribute something to human knowledge?

jlgreco 14y ago

This is absolute bullshit. There is no way in hell any university in a developed nation would drop their subscription to JSTOR. JSTOR keeps them on the right side of copyright law, keeps itself up to date, and provides infrastructure that the vast majority of university users find essential. Individuals not affiliated with universities may find such a pirated collection useful, but such individuals currently make up a fraction of one percent of JSTOR's revenue.

MichaelSalib 14y ago
Journals in the library + interlibrary loan keep them on the right side of copyright law. And many more expensive subscriptions provide universities with access to parts of the JSTOR archive. What's more, there are no university copyright investigations to fear: no one is going to force grad students to prove that they legally obtained every paper they ever read (how could that even work?), but even if they did, grad students have a perfectly legal explanation: they can just say they read/acquired their documents from the library and no one can prove otherwise. Universities aren't stupid; they know there's no threat from dropping JSTOR and they can count to $50,000 all too well.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Unless the university library it itself providing a unified accessible system to access a torrented (and somehow constantly up to date?) archive of JSTOR, then JSTOR will not be dropped. You are having serious tunnel vision if you think all grad students and professors want to spend their time fucking around with that, or even know how to do that.
  - MichaelSalib 14y ago
    I know that every university, there are multiple servers where students share terabytes of pirated movies, TV shows and music. And every university already has a unified accessible non-JSTOR system for reading old journal articles: its called the journal stacks in the library basement + interlibrary loan. Everyone already knows how to deal with that: its just less convenient.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      A university officially providing a pirated archive of JSTOR would be opening itself up to legal liability itself worth more than 50k. Add to that the cost of maintaining a digital archive comparable to JSTOR, the cost of training, and the cost of keeping it up to date, and you have to be absolutely insane or intellectually dishonest if you claim even a struggling school with limited resources would go with that. > I know that every university, there are multiple servers where students share terabytes of pirated movies, TV shows and music. You are being delusional if you think such a system is at all comparable to what it would take to replace JSTOR for all but a fraction of university JSTOR users. I was a technically inclined CS guy with far to much free time while in university and I would be royally pissed if my university had dropped JSTOR for some sort of ghetto fileshare with an aging torrent. Anyone a less ideal user than I would be crippled by that.
      - MichaelSalib 14y ago
        As I wrote earlier, I don't think universities would ever provide a pirated archive. They wouldn't need to. Grad students talk. They pass around USB drives. And pretty soon, everyone has the archive on their laptop.

ucee054 14y ago

You NEED access to journals and conferences if you are silly enough to become a research student (like I did) or even sillier and become a professional researcher. Also, there is no way on earth you can pay for it on a researcher's salary or stipend. Hence, the Universities and Laboratories are BLACKMAILED into paying for it on the researchers' behalf. (So the 50K/year thing applies to MIT, Harvard and a couple of other "customers".) However, outside of that context, J. Random Hacker might quite like to read a paper - his taxes paid for it after all, and there are like 3 good papers in existence. But JRH would never pay 50K for it. He probably CAN'T; JRH might need to take out a mortgage to pay that much. So if you want to pretend that the 50K multiplies by the potential readership as "loss due to copyright theft", you are committing a basic economic fallacy, which is normally debunked in Econ101. So I advise you to drop the whole 50K/year argument.

MichaelSalib 14y ago
You NEED access to journals and conferences And you have them, in dead tree form at every big university. Universities functioned long before JSTOR. BLACKMAILED If you think this is blackmail, you don't know much. if you want to pretend that the 50K multiplies by the potential readership as "loss due to copyright theft" I don't believe that at all. My point was just that the archive has serious commercial value. If you can license access to an archive for $50K/year, then saying it has "little or no commercial value" is obviously wrong, right? J. Random Hacker might quite like to read a paper He can always go to his nearest university library and go spelunking in the archival stacks looking for it. his taxes paid for it after all His taxes paid for JSTOR to dig up the paper journal, scan the articles, and pay data entry folk to type in metadata? Really? I don't think so. But JRH would never pay 50K for it. $50K/year is not the only price point being offered. You could always pay for individual paper downloads or you can get them free now.
- ucee054 14y ago
  Swartz's actions would have been an "attack" on a research archive, which the article classifies as having "little" commercial value (and Swartz wasn't profiting, it was civil disobedience). The Reuters news for yesterday lists the LIBOR scandal, which was an "attack" on financial data. The fine alone, for UBS alone, was $1.5Billion. Now that's what I call "serious commercial value". JSTOR, not so much. Do you want to keep arguing the point or do you feel silly enough already?

darkarmani 14y ago

> JSTOR sells access to its archive for $50K/year. That seems pretty damn valuable...I think that if Swartz successfully released the JSTOR archive, their entire business would have withered and died. JSTOR who declined to press charges is probably in the best position to value the damages Swartz inflicted.

betterunix 14y ago

1. There is no reason to think that any university or organization would have given up its JSTOR subscription because an archive was made available on BitTorrent. At the very least, universities would want up-to-date articles, and so anything published after the archive was amassed (which would be a large number in just a year's time) would still motivate a subscription. There is also JSTOR's search service, and the general support universities have for the copyright system (to the point of abandoning their own academic mission when copyrights force such a thing). 2. Why should we care if JSTOR goes out of business because an archive is published? If JSTOR's only value is in their ability to enforce other publishers' copyrights, then they should go out of business because human knowledge should not be restricted by copyrights. Copyrights only made sense for academic publications when we needed the publishing industry to make scholarly writing available on a widespread basis; in 2013, we have this thing called the Internet (perhaps you've heard of it) that is vastly more efficient and costs far less. So if JSTOR's search service is valuable, great, let's keep them around. If it is not, or if we can get the same thing without JSTOR (I suspect we could if we really tried), then we should let them and all the leeches whose publications they sell subscriptions to die quickly. Considering that a typical scientific journal publisher will not pay the authors of its articles, nor the reviewers, and often not even the editors, what exactly can they claim to be contributing to human knowledge to the point of justifying the continued restrictions on access to that knowledge that copyrights the publishers that hold them are imposing?

MichaelSalib 14y ago
anything published after the archive was amassed would still motivate a subscription For many journals, JSTOR doesn't have recent content available anyway; Universities typically subscribe to publishers to get electronic access to recent content while relying on JSTOR for access to older content. Why should we care if JSTOR goes out of business because an archive is published? It doesn't matter whether you care or not. But the law cares. Prosecutors care. Judges care. human knowledge should not be restricted by copyrights. You've decided that? Good for you! Do prosecutors and judges have to agree with that statement? What happens when they don't? Copyright is the law. You don't like that. I get it. But prosecutors and judges have to enforce the law as it is, not the law as some hackers on HN fervently wish it were. we have this thing called the Internet that is vastly more efficient and costs far less. This internet thing, that I've never heard of before (thanks for telling me about it!), does it make scanning and digitzing old paper journals free also? Does it make it so that data entry techs typing in metadata describing old paper journals don't have to paid? we should let them and all the leeches whose publications they sell subscriptions to die quickly How are we going to do that exactly? By not enforcing copyright laws or the CFAA, just for them? So, copyright laws will be enforced when it comes to stealing proprietary source code, but not for old journals? what exactly can they claim to be contributing to human knowledge I'm not sure I get your argument here. Is it that copyright law shouldn't be enforced because you've decided journal publishers are rapacious parasites (I think they are too actually)? Or that copyright law should only get enforced for entities that contribute something to human knowledge?