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You NEED access to journals and conferences
And you have them, in dead tree form at every big university. Universities functioned long before JSTOR.
BLACKMAIL
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.
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?
Swartz wasn't profiting, it was civil disobedience
As I've explained above, I don't think Swartz was trying to profit from this scheme. But I do think he was trying to destroy significant financial value (yes $50million/year is significant for me). And from a legal perspective, that's extremely serious.
Now that's what I call "serious commercial value". JSTOR, not so much.
So if I rob a bank and steal $30 million, that's not a crime with serious commercial value? Interesting.
Of course JSTOR was small potatoes compared to LIBOR. So what? 99% of all crimes are small potatoes compared to LIBOR. That argument proves way, way too much.
"99% of all crimes are small potatoes compared to LIBOR"
I doubt that you can show me that Swartz's "crime" was somehow doing more damage than 99% of all crimes.
I doubt that you can show me that it was doing more damage than 51% of all crimes.
In fact, I doubt you can show me that it was significant at all in the grand scheme of things.
What Swartz allegedly wanted to do is something similar to sticking a Windows ISO on BitTorrent.
If you think that's "extremely serious" or worth comparing to a bank robbery, this conversation is over.
It seems to me you are arguing four separate points:
1. JSTOR has a commercial value of $50mil/yr.
This is a fair point, if that is indeed JSTOR's revenue (though "commercial" isn't exactly the right word to describe a non-profit organization's activities).
2. Aaron's intention was to destroy JSTOR.
Unless you have another source beside the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto[0] and the recent summaries posted online by those close to the case, I don't believe this at all. Aaron's intent, as expressed by the manifesto, was to increase access to knowledge. I also do not consider a federal indictment to be a reliable source for determining the frame of mind of the indicted.
3. Aaron's archive would have been a substitute for JSTOR access, and thus capable of destroying JSTOR.
The other responses to your comments have disproven this claim fairly effectively. JSTOR provides legitimacy to university libraries, it provides an active, searchable index, full text search, online viewing, and a continually updated collection. Aaron's collection of PDFs would provide none of that.
Furthermore, the original purpose of JSTOR was to free up space used by archived print journals, so your claim that print journals in the library stacks would substitute for JSTOR is demonstrably false.
4. Destroying a business model (of a non-profit organization, no less) is equivalent to stealing (e.g. your "if I rob a bank" analogy).
Despite arguing against the idea that Aaron wanted to or was even capable of destroying JSTOR's business model, I will briefly address this point.
Making a particular business model obsolete is not in itself criminal. This has been argued to death online, so just search for "buggy whip manufacturers."
[0] http://pastebin.com/cefxMVAy http://pastebin.com/cefxMVAy
There's a nice two step shuffle here. On the one hand, people say "JSTOR is keeping this vitally important knowledge away from THE PEOPLE!" and imply that Swartz was going to rectify that by releasing the JSTOR archive. Then, when I point out that releasing the JSTOR archive would completely undermine JSTOR's viability as a going concern, the same people argue that "there's no way that the JSTOR archive Swartz was going to release could possibly substitute for the service JSTOR provides now!".
Well, if that's true, then I can't see how Swartz's actions were going to help anyone. After all, if the archive torrented is completely inferior to the JSTOR service, then no one would find it valuable. It wouldn't help anyone. So why exactly was Swartz interested in it?
Aaron's intent, as expressed by the manifesto, was to increase access to knowledge.
I doubt he particularly cared about destroying JSTOR one way or another. But he did care about making it so that everyone on earth could have completely free access to every single JSTOR article. If he had achieved that goal, there's no way JSTOR could function as a going concern now. I mean, maybe JSTOR could continue as an company charging $1/month for a search index, but it wouldn't be scanning in new material like crazy right now.
Making a particular business model obsolete is not in itself criminal.
Of course not. But violating the CFAA is. Copyright infringement, on a large enough scale certainly is.
What on earth does this non-profit spend $50M/yr doing? I've come up with the following:
- scan old articles (this really shouldn't be accounted as
a business expense: once you've scanned an article you
never need to scan it again and there are a finite
number of articles in existence, thus this is that rare
sort of capital spending that can be depreciated over
an essentially infinite period)
- serve saved content and related services online (the
price of this activity is dropping all the time)
- sales, accounting, legal (these activities would be much
less costly for a free service like arXiv.org)
- license payments (hard to get around this without some
[justified IMO] changes to the law, but I'm sure JSTOR
is also marking up these charges and besides most
education institutions already make equivalent payments
to extant journals)
Granted, I've left out the gold-plated executive washroom and first-class airfare for lobbyists, but it's reasonable for society to question why JSTOR is an entity that deserves its tax exemptions.
"But I do think he was trying to destroy significant financial value"
Lock me up then, because I have been pushing people to abandon the academic publishing industry and share knowledge more freely for a while now. Since when should any of us care about what happens to those leeches?
Is JSTOR's archive valuable for society? Not anymore because we have a much better way to spread human knowledge: peer to peer networking on the Internet. We do not need a centralized service that charges money for access in an age of widely available high-speed connections. JSTOR's search service may be valuable, but Aaron did nothing to threaten that service and I suspect that it would take a half dozen HN readers a few weeks to develop something just as useful that every university could run on its own servers or anyone else who wished to do so. We could probably make a distributed search system if we really put our minds to it; what holds us back is the copyright system itself and the publishers who will only allow JSTOR to access the articles at grossly inflated prices.
We are not talking about something debatable, like whether or not the RIAA and MPAA should continue to have their business models protected by copyright. Journal publishers and JSTOR could vanish and research would continue to happen, scholarly articles would continue to be written, and human knowledge would be more accessible than ever before. Journal publishers do nothing at all to continue the expansion of human knowledge: they do not pay the authors of articles, they do not pay the reviewers, and many do not even pay the editors of the journals. We stopped needing them when the world wide web was invented (and probably even before that -- once global computer networks became a real thing, academic publishing became obsolete, and it has been propped up by the copyright system ever since).
Rather than being charged with a crime, Aaron Swartz should have been asked to advise the President on how to improve our access to education and to knowledge in general.
Since when should any of us care about what happens to those leeches?
Can you give me a list of entities for which copyright law no longer applies? Or do you think copyright law no longer applies for everyone?
Better yet, just give me a list of laws that I can now break with impunity, because you said so.
My point was that the law is out-of-sync with the needs of society, and has come to serve only the interests of an anachronistic industry that has long been obsolete. Breaking bad laws to bring attention to them -- and hopefully to get our representatives to fix things -- is a civic duty, a form of civil disobedience without which we would never move forward.