Slashdot Mirror
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."
in response to the arrest of Aaron Swartz for, effectively, downloading too many articles from JSTOR
No, that jackass got arrested for not only hacking MIT systems but physically breaking into equipment cabinets and messing with the hardware. He did this so that he could "effectively download too many articles from JSTOR", but that isn't what he got arrested for.
I am all for civil disobedience when it is merited, but don't go crying when you get arrested and charged for that disobedience. Especially don't go trying to distort the reasons for your arrest to try and trick people into supporting you. There are so many causes I support where I wouldn't be caught seen with the "activists" pushing them because they do bullshit like this.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
In this day and age it is impossible to tell whether or not it is illegal. The truth is it might not matter. If you download it and someone in the Justice Department thinks it is illegal you might very well lose your job and will at least have to pay for a lawyer to defend yourself.
Is the issue worth the risk? Everybody thinking about clicking that link has to decide for themselves.
but its public domain right? Nothing illegal about it then right?
Making copies of a copy you have, no. But you still have to get that copy in a legal way, you don't have the right to violate terms of services or laws to get it. In that sense it's irrelevant whether the works he downloaded from JSTOR were copyrighted or not.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Public domain? How quaint ... Do we still have that? Or will they reassert copyright over it as a result of publishing it? :(
I have little faith in this (but I applaud anybody who actually left this in the public domain).
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
No, it's volunteer work written up and edited for free for the benefit of mankind, then locked up by transfer of copyright and published very expensively. If you don't pay $19 for each article you read, then the world will be destabilized and fall into a spontaneously created black hole, and baby Jesus will weep from his expensive condo on Mount Olympus, Mars.
I know a lot of academics are becoming annoyed by the publishers and their business models. Frankly its a disgrace that most research isn't freely available to the general public. More often than not they have paid for it via taxation and university fees (most research, at least in europe where i am, is taxpayer funded). Add to that the fact that the academics do the work, write the papers, review the papers (for free i might add) and mostly act as journal editors (for free again), and its hard to see really what the publishers are doing beyond hosting the PDF.
Oh and the best bit - when you submit your paper to the publisher, you also sign over copyright. So they even own all the taxpayer funded work. Actually i was wrong at the start, its beyond a disgrace.
There's a connection here to rational ignorance. Rational ignorance is when you don't bother to understand and complain about the sugar quota, because it's only costing you a few dollars per year, whereas informing yourself and complaining about it would cost a lot more.
From George Will on America, Politics, and Baseball
From An Interview with Milton Friedman
The problem with this is that the sugar families note that hardly anyone is actively complaining and use this to argue "well, no one complains, so it's all right".
In the courts, the flow of money is tangible, whereas pervasive resentment masked by rational ignorance is not. JSTOR will attempt to use this to their advantage. The only way to drive a wedge into this equation is to make both sides tangible.
in 3... 2... 1...
These old papers weren't published directly on internet in 1923. Someone had to transfer all of them from physical form to digital form, page by page. That's is a huge amount of work. Should we all be entitled to enjoy them free of charge? So who's paying the workers?
it is somehow immoral to charge $8 to fetch an out-of-copyright article
No its immoral to charge anything for any bit of information.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So you're saying all those public domain works *aren't* free for the taking at Barnes and Noble?
I could have sworn GB was short for gigabyte. When did that stop? Why didn't I get the memo? Or is it a jigabyte?
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
bump. yo can we do this?
No, the immoral part is using the law to stop someone from providing those same public domain articles for cheaper.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There is a better way. Various groups are seriously trying to push open-access publishing, Frontiers being one example (frontiersin.org). When you look into the problem a little more closely, you find that publishing isn't free. Hosting the PDF is cheap, but somebody has to produce it in the first place and maintain a website. And before that, someone has to arrange for the peer-review to happen, find an editorial board and reviewers, etc. Most open-access outfits use the publisher-pays model - i.e. you pay to have your article published, and then anyone can download it for free. The trouble is this shifts the payments from the largely invisible library subscriptions (taken from university staff overheads) to a very direct, comes-off-your-grant payment. But it is still a better model - we just need to see publishing become a recognised cost in grants. Your article is then, subject to peer review, freely available to anyone who wants it - an the authors retain copyright. Think about it next time you're publishing.
Now, does anyone want to explain why impact factors are a crap, self-serving metric that promotes more rather than better articles?
The benefit of giving someone the copyright is so that they can distribute copies to everybody (for a cost, of course, if they so desire), without fear that it might be copied. Whereas if someone has the only copy, but can not get a copyright, then they will prevent anyone from obtaining the document. So, even if something is in the public domain, you don't automatically get a right to have access to the work in order to copy it.
Protection from access can by via lock (royal society), or can be attempted by trying to give you access only if you sign some agreement (JSTOR).
I think also under some conditions, the original work is under public domain, but a derivative (say retranslation, or new photo, or some such) gets a new copyright.
So, it isn't just important that the a work is in the public domain, but that many people actually have copies of it.
that it is somehow immoral to charge $8 to fetch an out-of-copyright article.
If its out of copyright, they shouldn't be the only source, and the market should rapidly come up with alternative sources that are priced at what the market will bear.
Its not inherently immoral to charge $8 for it... but it does raise eyebrows that they are ABLE to charge $8 for it. If they can't manage to "cover the costs of hosting the material and making it available and still turn a profit for less" then surely the market can find another provider who can... given that its not copy protected any more... what exactly is the obstacle?
Are they somehow inhibiting the dissemination of out-of-copyright public-domain materials to protect a monopolisitic pricing structure for those materials? That does start to sound like its moving into immoral territory.
I thought the reason for librarians is to make data easily found by users of the library. Then I go to do research and am astonished by the amount of effort required to find anything in digital format. I think my mom could come up with a better system... the librarians are failing.
I think the immoral part is breaking into someone else's property.
This is kind of a clever post, however I have to wonder why you didn't just post the .torrent file directly as they are normally plaintext and much shorter than the binary-ascii encoded e-mail file that you posted.
-Buck
http://ompldr.org/vOWw4eg/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society__fro.6554331.TPB.torrent
It wasn't plain text. But Slashdot had a post size limit that the post preview didn't have, so it didn't work anyway. Mirror posted below; hopefully people can access that.
The publisher has a legitimate right to cover the costs of hosting the material and making it available
Sure, they have a right to cover their costs. They weren't trying to just cover their costs, though. If they weren't trying to profit off it, they wouldn't have been upset when someone undercut their price.
I mean, when you started mentioning black hole and Mt Olympus on Mars, I keep expecting that somehow the evil overlord Xenu had a hand in the matter.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Of all the academic paper databases to pick on, why JSTOR? It's a non-profit institution that tries to make as much as possible available at low cost. Zero cost? No. They have bills to pay too. And while I understand the principle that if it is out of copyright, it would be ideal if it were freely available to everyone, scanning thousands of documents takes time (i.e. money if you are hiring people to do it) and hosting thousands of documents for access by thousands of people costs money too.
If people want this to change, they have two legitimate options:
1) scan the old, out-of-copyright papers in themselves and make them available for free in a volunteer, "open" effort (paying for the website hosting is left as an exercise for the reader)
2) donate enough to JSTOR that they don't have to charge for access to public domain works anymore (if you have boatloads of money, make it a condition)
Ripping off JSTOR's hard work scanning in documents isn't a solution even if we are talking about public domain materials. "Public domain" doesn't mean "free access" as in $$$, it means "free to copy", as in if you can get an original copy, copyright does not prohibit you from copying it and doing whatever you want with it. If you've gotten access illegally in the first place, that's a whole other equation. You might not be brought up on copyright charges, but you could get charged with a different crime.
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html ..."
"One of the distinctive features of left activists is their willingness to go to the streets to win people to their causes and create the political pressures necessary for the social changes they advocate. Studies in social psychology and sociology support this strategy by showing there has to be a non-routine dimension to any effort toward change. It doesn't make any sense to people to say that things are terrible, but they just should vote and write letters to their elected representatives. If things are going to change, then people have to get out of their routines one way or another. There has to be social disruption. There has to be a "getting in the way of power" as one author-activist puts it. There has to be a social movement that has a shared political identity.
But case studies also show that these movements go nowhere without an electoral component, as seen with the women's suffrage movement, the industrial union movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, and the environmental movement. Changes in government were the end result in every case. They usually don't go far enough, but that just means the next cycle of movement activism is necessary.
Studies of social movements in the United States also show that the necessary social disruption has to be created through the principled use of strategic nonviolence. Any form of violence, whether property damage or physical battles with opponents and police, will turn off the great majority of Americans and bring down overwhelming police and military repression.
For the past 10-15 years the usefulness of an exclusive focus on nonviolence has been questioned by new activists. They do not see much use in the carefully orchestrated acts of civil disobedience to which it is often reduced, where the time and place of arrest have been negotiated beforehand with the police. They have come to see nonviolence as primarily a philosophy, a religious sentiment, or a moral renunciation of violence, or even as a New Age belief in a way to create win-win situations for all concerned if there is enough love and understanding.
However, the strategic nonviolence I am talking about is far more than that. It is a strategy for winning in conflicts where there are real differences between the adversaries, including class antagonisms. As a form of conflict, nonviolent direct action is best understood in terms of the same basic concepts that are used to understand violent (military) conflicts, because the underlying reality in both cases is the engagement in conflict over opposing perspectives and interests. Thus the phrase "strategic nonviolence," which is in fact what trade union organizers practice through strikes and what civil rights leaders employed through sit-ins, freedom rides, and boycotts. It is a form of struggle that is focused on prevailing despite the fact that the opponents -- usually a government or power elite -- have superior resources and are likely to use one or another form of violence if they think it can succeed.
See also James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear":
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. Wha
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
As somebody who probably makes his living in an information-based job, be careful.
I guess they are. You just have to go down into the basement of a university library that's old enough to have them, and make a photocopy/scan. Then you can do whatever you want.
When you're done, post a link to Slashdot please - I'm sure we'd all love to have access to these. I personally hate having to trek over to the library when I need an older paper.
FYI - some of the older stuff HAS been scanned and put up on the web for free. I was delighted to find Fourier's original paper/book online when I was writing my thesis.
I stand by my statement. that *information* should always be free and not be used as a tool to control people. You can charge a nominal fee for the distribution device.. ( such as a printed book )
And if this 'somebody' wants to disagree to my face, that is their right, even tho i could care less.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I suppose if you consider a person as a distribution device I might go for that. Anyway, this article isn't about charging for information and the OPs question wasn't about information. Both are about charging for a PDF document (scanned and probably OCRed, possibly hand proof read and corrected).
The OP specifically said he thought it was okay to cover the costs of hosting the material and making it available. He used a physical copy of "Treasure Island" as an example. Your post certainly seemed to be disagreeing (not agreeing) with his statement.
You're not trying to wiggle out of it now, are you?
"Naturally someone will respond that this is a different fight and how dare I compare freedom of information to the civil rights movement etc."
I got slapped down a decade ago for comparing issues related to copyright to slavery, but I still feel it is a problem that is becoming related to slavery, as a system of control and now justification for imprisonment (copyright infringement used to be mostly only a civil, not a criminal, offense a couple decades ago).
"License management tools: good, bad, or ugly?"
http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.misc.discuss/browse_thread/thread/df4b4363d544f766/1e499c6db59117a2?hl=en#1e499c6db59117a2
A deep issue that no one seems to be talking about is that ultimately, how can you "prove" you have legal access to any digital pattern at all, or "prove" that you do not have patterns you should not -- without a complete review of every financial and informational transaction you have ever made? Like to see if you gave the original away and so forth? How can you prove you have a right to read some book you purchased and format shifted to digital media? And so on. This is a big issue when there are reward-offered "tip lines" for people to rat on their employers or coworkers. Ultimately, the only way copyright can be enforced in the age to come, where you can store the library of congress on your cell phone in twenty years plus all the music ever recorded, is to have an unbelievably intrusive police state...
Is an all pervasive police state what we want in the USA in order to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" which is the constitutional intent of copyright? Or is a police state likely to shut down a lot of creativity in a society?
A decade ago I suggested that in the same way people in the 1960s would have laughed at the idea of a million people in prison in the USA for non-violent drug offenses, which is what we have now, so too we may see the same with copyright soon enough, unless our ideology changes. Hard to believe it was possible then, but we still seem to be going that way. Where do we want to be in ten more years?
A related satire I sent to the US DOJ years ago when they asked for comments:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
Lawrence Lessig made a similar point in his book "Code" in the first chapter, "Code Is Law".
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So, is this torrent legal or not? Although I understand these documents are public domain, did the torrent creator get the data in a less-than legal way? Am I liable in any way if I download said torrent? No, I did not RTFA.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Transformative work such as translation or scanning on to new medium, whilst laudable should not gain a full new copyright but one in proportion to the effort. Translation is hard and often requires creative thought to translate cultural idioms, so maybe 20-30 years benefit to reflect that there was effort, making it worthwhile but reflecting that it not an original work. Format shifting on the other hand isn't amazingly hard nor creative, and can often be automated therefore the gain should be made from distribution and it shouldn't gain much if any additional protection (perhaps 5 years if it is from medium classified by a national archivist as endangered).
I can't seem to be able to DL the damn thing from Piratebay. Either I get a "search is frazzled come back later" message or I can only DL a tiny little file. I switched form Opera to Miro and the same problem. I was wondering if someone has a mirror on this thing. This is really important stuff. It needs to be copied and re-copied.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
There is now a Wikisource page setup to help publish this material:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:WikiProject_Royal_Society_Journals
wow, having these all in a search-able database would make a great tor hidden service. Can someone get on that?
The only one who denied access to the server where the dumbass admins who blocked whole subnets, because they were too stupid to track a MAC address to a physical switch port, and unplug the device.
Note this quote from the above article: And by that point, when most every citizen is guilty of the crime, no jury will convict. This assumes that jury nullification is still a viable option. Note that the USA legal system is attempting to dismantle and marginalize the principle of jury nullification, precisely because of this sort of issue. This author suggests you support FIJA, the Fully Informed Jury Association, to help keep empower jurors to defend justice.
Note the discussion in Slashdot, just a few days ago, about the pros and cons of jury nullfication: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2339776&cid=36832512 .
If you are in the EU, there is currently a public EU consultation on open access (deadline 09 September). This was also mentioned on German heise.de earlier this week.
I tried using the "binary" units, and they just don't work for me.
And they don't make any difference to most of the people I talk to. 1024 is close enough to a thousand, 1,048,576 is close enough to a million (US), 1,073,741,824 is close enough to a billion (US), and anything higher is well beyond the pale.
Even when talking about HD sizes. That's the reason KB, MB, etc. were coined as abbreviations. When we really need to know, we don7t depend on either abbreviation. The manufacturer can advertise either 512 GiB or 550 GB and the SI or sysadmin (who are the ones who think they erally care) aren't really sure until they see either
5.498 * 10^11 bytes
or
pre-formatted:
16384 segments,
65536 sectors/segment
512 bytes/sector
or some similarly specific numbers. (Yeah, I know that's too much for RAM and HD would never have exactly 2^39 bytes. It's intended to show how ridiculous the argument is.
It's a waste of taxpayer money to publish that kind of a "standard" except as a joke. (As a joke, it is useful, both for relieving stress and for teaching about numbering and measurement related to IT.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Copyright on re-published public domain works is supposed to be on the expression, since the expression is what is new. The work derived from remains in the public domain.
In other words, the typefaces and font sizes used, any new illustrations, any editing and/or modernizing of the language, resulting pagination, added commentary, annotation, that sort of stuff, can be covered by new copyright because it is new work.
Some re-publishers bend over backward to avoid letting on that the original is out of copyright. I suppose they have no confidence in their own work.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Try, new arrangements of said classical scores? Or copyright on an anthology?
In the US, at least, that's supposed to be the limit, and it should be plenty.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
In the US, at any rate, there is supposed to be no such thing as a royal society (with the kind of power you describe).
I don't know about copyright law elsewhere, but under all conditions in the US, the copyright on the original work covers the original work, and expires.
Copyright on derivative works covers only what is added/modified, even when the original is public domain. An author is never supposed to be granted copyright for something he or she did not create.
But some publishing companies (I repeat myself, I guess) bend over backwards to avoid letting anyone know when the original works are in the public domain. The think they can get away with it because usually there is no one left to defend the works.
But it sucks value out of society as a whole, so we all, including them, end up losing for it.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.