Release of 33GiB of Scientific Publications

An anonymous reader writes "A Wikipedian, Greg Maxwell, has released 33GiB of scientific publications [note: torrent] from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in response to the arrest of Aaron Swartz for, effectively, downloading too many articles from JSTOR. The release consists of 18,592 scientific articles previously released at $8-$19 each and all published prior to 1923 and so public domain."

Comments

The article seems to imply

[bugs2squash]

that it is somehow immoral to charge $8 to fetch an out-of-copyright article. I don;t see it that way at all. The publisher has a legitimate right to cover the costs of hosting the material and making it available, it's similar to buying an copy of "Treasure Island" I would expect to pay for a printed copy of it at a bookshop even though the content is in the public domain..