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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

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.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Such a system would never replace a subscription to JSTOR. You have massive tunnel vision if you honestly think it could.
    - anonymouz 14y ago
      It could cause them financial harm. Libraries have a fixed budget and choose wisely which subscriptions to take. If people at a department already know where to get the stuff that JSTOR offers for free, that will make the JSTOR subscription less valuable and other subscriptions more valuable to them. Academics are quite used to being creative in acquiring articles. It's not untypical to ask colleagues and friends at other universities to scan and email articles that they can't get access to through their own library. Before the advent of the Internet this was done with letters. Downloading a torrent is a minor inconvenience in comparison. A large majority of people I have talked to have at some point acquired scans of at least on book online (be it to give it to students because the library has only one copy, for convenience during travelling or because the local library has no copies and an interlibrary loan would take some time while they need the book now).
olefoo 14y ago
umm. That may have been true in the latter half of the '90s and the first half of the 'noughties but it is certainly not true today. Most universities have an extensive copyright policing function in their network operations center, designed to shield them from liability. Not to say that pirate servers aren't hanging out on Uni nets these days, but they are stealthed, and deniable.

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.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Such a system would never replace a subscription to JSTOR. You have massive tunnel vision if you honestly think it could.
  - anonymouz 14y ago
    It could cause them financial harm. Libraries have a fixed budget and choose wisely which subscriptions to take. If people at a department already know where to get the stuff that JSTOR offers for free, that will make the JSTOR subscription less valuable and other subscriptions more valuable to them. Academics are quite used to being creative in acquiring articles. It's not untypical to ask colleagues and friends at other universities to scan and email articles that they can't get access to through their own library. Before the advent of the Internet this was done with letters. Downloading a torrent is a minor inconvenience in comparison. A large majority of people I have talked to have at some point acquired scans of at least on book online (be it to give it to students because the library has only one copy, for convenience during travelling or because the local library has no copies and an interlibrary loan would take some time while they need the book now).

olefoo 14y ago

umm. That may have been true in the latter half of the '90s and the first half of the 'noughties but it is certainly not true today. Most universities have an extensive copyright policing function in their network operations center, designed to shield them from liability. Not to say that pirate servers aren't hanging out on Uni nets these days, but they are stealthed, and deniable.