Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Dealing w/ Copying of Online Articles via Open Proxies?

Posted by Cliff on from the preventing-unauthorized-distribution dept.

Creosote asks: "Concerns about piracy are no longer just for the big commercial media outfits. JSTOR, one of the major repositories and distributors of online versions of scholarly journals, has been hit by crackers taking advantage of open proxy servers to download about 51,000 articles from 11 JSTOR journals. Even nonprofit academic publishers rely on income from publications to exist, so the spectre of large-scale unauthorized copying is legitimately scary to them. In a letter to librarians and publishers, the president of JSTOR notes that while the "threat of open proxies has been recognized for some time in the web community...it does not appear that network administrators, librarians, or content providers are aware that organized efforts are being employed to gain unauthorized access to restricted campus resources" through them. I work for a nonprofit publisher (a university press) that will soon be making peer-reviewed digital projects available online, and they can't all be given away for free, so this hits close to home. Are there better solutions than turning into an attack dog, ala the RIAA and the MPAA?"

3 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Perhaps this is the first chink . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful
    . . . in the armor of the academic peer review "cartel." Of what relevance is an organization like JSTOR in an age when anyone can publish and peer review could be done electronically. The idea of locking up scholarly papers and charging fees seems perverse to me, anyway--they've already been paid for once by taxpayers or donors to non-profits.

    ~~~

  2. Check all allowed IPs from open proxies by joebp · · Score: 4, Insightful
    From the page: We're sorry. You do not have access to JSTOR from your current location.
    It seems they have some whitelist of allowed IPs. Why not just traverse this once every so often and look for open proxies?
    Slash said: You can't post to this page.
    Another retarded open proxy problem :-(
  3. Probably no intention to resell by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 4, Insightful


    The people who stole the articles probably have no intention to resell them. Probably, they were just doing it because they could. The articles will sit on some hard drive somewhere, and eventually be deleted.

    It would be impossible to resell the articles without revealing who stole them. Also, would you want an article from an unknown source, that could have changed it?