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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.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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).