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.
Universities aren't stupid; they know there's no threat from dropping JSTOR and they can count to $50,000 all too well.
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.
> 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.
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).
Not to say that pirate servers aren't hanging out on Uni nets these days, but they are stealthed, and deniable.
Nor would anyone hesitate to prosecute one of us (yes, I am a grad student) if we were to share an archive on BitTorrent.
"Universities aren't stupid"
Really? Part of my introduction to grad school was an annoying quiz about complying with copyrights and a bunch of reminders about the penalties I would face if I dared to infringe. Yes, really, my school takes copyrights that seriously, and guess what? My alma mater also subjected me to that sort of treatment during my undergrad orientation.
Do you really think universities are prepared to stand up to the copyright system? Do you think any mainstream university is going to suggest that people download an illegal archive of scholarly publications? I can tell you this: I would be shocked if any respected university official endorsed the use of an illegal archive of scholarly articles, textbooks, or anything containing even the tiniest amount of human knowledge.
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?
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?
...and the law is wrong. It is wrong, because it is no longer serving the interests of the people governed by it. The entire basis for the US legal system is that laws serve the interest of the people, not that laws are handed down from above or that the law itself has any moral or ethical justification. If society's interests are no longer served by a law -- and it is hard to argue that in the case of academic publishing, copyrights actually serve society's interests -- then the law should repealed.
"Do prosecutors and judges have to agree with that statement? What happens when they don't?"
They become the targets of congressional investigations, which is what is happening to Carmen Ortiz right now. It is horrifying that it took the death of a man with a bright future to bring this issue to the public's attention, but now that everyone is looking it is good to see Congress doing something that helps people for a change. Minute as the response from Congress has been, it is at least a step in the right direction.
"prosecutors and judges have to enforce the law as it is"
No they don't. Prosecutors have to serve the interests of the public and are expected to decline prosecution in cases where they are asked to prosecute someone whose actions were potentially illegal but both benefited the public and were neither harmful nor dangerous. Judges are expected to strike down laws that violate the constitution, and to give light or suspended sentences to people who are guilty of violating the law but whose imprisonment or punishment would do nothing to benefit society. The idea that prosecutors and judges have some kind of obligation to enforce laws that are clearly misguided is on the level of the fallacy that juries have a duty to convict if the evidence shows a defendant is guilty (jury nullification is an important check on laws that the public disagrees with).
"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?"
That is an organizational problem, not a technology or legal issue. Universities could do this via their library system, or we could set up a system where people who voluntarily scan articles or write metadata get preferential treatment when they search or download (think of BitTorrent trackers that give preferential treatment to users with higher seed ratios). For that matter, why should we have to rely on a single organization or system? Maybe you are better than I am when it comes to entering metadata; maybe other people would rather trust your metadata over mine. Maybe we could set up something like a web of trust.
It is not like this could not be done; it is more like the law stops it in order to protect an obsolete business model.
"How are we going to do that exactly?"
Here's a suggestion: exclude scientific articles from copyright restrictions. If you want a compromise, how about this: exclude those articles for which the research was paid for with tax dollars from copyright. As a first step, that would not be so bad. Let the copyright battle be exclusive to entertainment and software, and leave human knowledge out of it.
We are already questioning the CFAA as a result of this case. Why not question copyrights as well?
"So, copyright laws will be enforced when it comes to stealing proprietary source code, but not for old journals?"
That would at least be a step in the right direction.
"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?"
It is that copyright law was meant to ensure our access to the knowledge that journal publishers publish, but that in today's world it is actually making that knowledge harder to access. The copyright system was never meant to ensure that the authors of scholarly articles would be paid; it was meant to ensure that the publishing system would be monetized. At the time, the publishing industry was the best way to make enough copies of scientific journals to satisfy society's need, and the publishing system is expensive and must be paid for. Everything other than the distribution of articles is irrelevant to copyrights, because everything else is done by volunteers (writing, reviewing, and editing) and would continue to be done regardless of money.
We no longer need that system, because we have a distribution system that is substantially more efficient and less costly. Copyright is no longer promoting the best system for distributing scholarly articles; it is now preventing the use of that system and promoting an anachronistic system that by today's standards is shockingly inefficient. It seems reasonable to conclude that copyrights should simply not be applied to academic publishing, at least as copyrights currently exist, and that a new legal framework that promotes the use of the Internet should be enacted.
Sure, there are hurdles. Publishers serve as archives, they pay people to insert metadata, and sometimes they even scan older articles for us. I fail to see how these activities could not be accomplished with the publishing industry. Universities already have more than enough computer capacity to act as archives (I know a professor who took the time to scan his entire library, thousands of textbooks -- it fits on a couple of external hard drives sitting on his desk, with room to spare for storing all patents ever granted in all countries). Metadata is something that could be done as a community, perhaps via some sort of system as I had mentioned above, or it could be done by the universities themselves as a one-time cost for old articles (metadata for new articles could be inserted automatically when those articles are published). Scanners are not hard to find -- my school's library makes many available to patrons, I have one on my desk, and my department has many as well (and of course, I know someone who scanned thousands of books on his own); again, we could create a system that incentivizes scanning as a community effort, or rely on universities to do it. If we actually cared about the original goal of copyrights as related to academic publishing, we would be investing some time in finding better ways to do things now that we have the technology to do so.
You could summarize the argument like this: the law is standing in the way of the sort of progress that society is desperately in need of; therefore, changing the law is imperative.
Your proposal is unconstitutional. "Takings" must be compensated or you run into 5th amendment issues.
If you want a compromise, how about this: exclude those articles for which the research was paid for with tax dollars from copyright.
At my school, I owned the copyright to anything I published unless I used school resources. Even if I published while being funded by an DARPA grant. Moreover, school funding was split evenly between tuition, federal government grants, and private grants. How can you justify forcing people to give up copyright when the public only paid for one third of the research?
They become the targets of congressional investigations
But that doesn't change the law. In fact, none of the proposals we've seen in response to Swartz's suicide involve copyright changes. Copyright law isn't going to change at all.
Copyrights can only be granted for a limited time according to the constitution. The fifth amendment only applies to property and despite the use of the term "intellectual property" by lawyers and those who profit from copyrights, copyright is not actually a form of property. What is unconstitutional is copyrights that last forever, which is why Congress periodically extends copyright terms as an end-run around the constitution.
"How can you justify forcing people to give up copyright when the public only paid for one third of the research?"
Simple: the entire point of copyright is to ensure that American society will have access to creative work. It is not meant to be a form of property, it was never meant as a form of property, and researchers' copyrights on their work are doing nothing to ensure public access to those works.
Further, it is not at all out of line for researchers to give up their copyrights. I cannot speak for your field, but in my field, we routinely assign copyrights to journals and give up any copyright claims thereafter. The entire point of publishing researcher is for other people to read it, cite it, and build on it. Researchers gain nothing by restricting access to their published work, and researchers benefit from their work being made more widely available.
Don't swallow the propaganda that the copyright lobby has been shoving down our throats. Copyright is not about ensuring that authors can control who reads their work or how many copies exist in the world. Copyright is about monetizing the production and distribution of creative work. In the case of research, copyright has nothing to do with monetizing the work, because it is paid for regardless of copyright, and so the only point of copyrights on published research is to monetize the publishing system. We forgot the point of copyright long ago, thanks to decades of lobbying effort by the people who profit from the copyright system.
Why are you publishing your research, exactly? Is it not so that other people can read it, and if that is the reason, why would you care about receiving copyrights on that work? I cannot speak for you, but when I publish my work, I do so with the intention of other people reading it -- something that copyright does nothing to encourage these days.
Two words: civil forfeiture
Running into constitutional issues isn't even a speed bump to the government at this point. That ship sailed long ago.
JSTOR who declined to press charges is probably in the best position to value the damages Swartz inflicted.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
An analogy: margarine is inferior in taste to butter. To those who can afford butter (universities), margarine is undesirable. To those who cannot (laypeople, journalists), margarine may be an acceptable substitute.
Inferior does not mean valueless, nor does it mean the value of the superior product is diminished.
Of course not. But violating the CFAA is. Copyright infringement, on a large enough scale certainly is.
This is a completely separate debate, and addressed elsewhere. Summarized, it is debatable whether Aaron's actions (changing MAC address) do or should constitute Wire Fraud or CFAA violations. It is also debatable whether any nonviolent crime should ever have a penalty larger than any violent crime. I will not address any of these points further in this thread.
If Swartz's material had been released, J Random Hacker, who simply wouldn't have read any of the JSTOR papers before, would now read them. MIT, on the other hand, would still pay for them. Though I can see how Podunk Community College in ThirdWorldistan might not pay for it.
The same way that you can get pirate Windows now, and some 15 year old kid in Thailand does. But Goldman Sachs still pays for a license. But some dodgy outfit in Beijing might not.
The principle here is not a legal principle, it is an economic principle. It is called loss of earnings. Look it up.
Instead of whinging that Swartz was going to destroy a $50 Million business, admit that the loss of earnings he would have caused would have been ZERO.
More disturbing than your ignorance of Econ101 is how you are fixating on the cost of Swartz's "crime", excluding the wider social aspects including the deadweight loss imposed on society as a result of copyright lobbying.
It's like a hobbit-sized version of somebody complaining about how the cotton industry would shrink - the horrors! - if we were to stop slavery.
- 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)
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.
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.