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Feds Add 9 Felony Charges Against Swartz For JSTOR Hack
Last year Aaron Swartz was indicted on four felony counts for allegedly stealing millions of academic journal articles from JSTOR. Today, Federal prosecutors piled on nine additional felony charges. The charges (PDF) are mostly covered under the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and are likely to test the legislation's limits. According to Wired, "The indictment accuses Swartz of repeatedly spoofing the MAC address — an identifier that is usually static — of his computer after MIT blocked his computer based on that number. The grand jury indictment also notes that Swartz didn't provide a real e-mail address when registering on the network. Swartz also allegedly snuck an Acer laptop bought just for the downloading into a closet at MIT in order to get a persistent connection to the network. Swartz allegedly hid his face from surveillance cameras by holding his bike helmet up to his face and looking through the ventilation holes when going in to swap out an external drive used to store the documents. Swartz also allegedly named his guest account 'Gary Host,' with the nickname 'Ghost.'"
I am ugly
I admit I'm not familiar with the case and didn't read more than the summary, but even in an instance where someone breaks into someone else's network shouldn't it still be considered copyright infringement and not stealing when the original owner isn't being deprived of something?
Forgive my ignorance.
Spoofing a MAC address is not illegal ..
AccountKiller
"The indictment accuses Swartz of repeatedly spoofing the MAC address — an identifier that is usually static — of his computer after MIT blocked his computer based on that number.
Right, and...? Is a MAC address some sort of protected id? Everyone knows that MAC filtering is ineffective, and MAC altering is enabled by hardware.
Swartz didn't provide a real e-mail address when registering on the network.
Uh oh, I'm in trouble.
Swartz allegedly hid his face from surveillance cameras by holding his bike helmet up to his face and looking through the ventilation holes when going in to swap out an external drive used to store the documents.
Again, so what? Is it some requirement that we display ourselves clearly to all security cameras?
Swartz also allegedly named his guest account 'Gary Host,' with the nickname 'Ghost.'"
Well, that is scary. Prosecute away then.
Federal prosecutors are some sick bastards. The worst of the worst. This is clearly intended to dissuade Swartz from exercising his constiutional right to a trial. Throw every charge at him in order to scare him into accepting a plea bargain. This is why 97% of federal cases end in plea bargains. Not because prosecutors are right 97% of the time, but because they are the biggest bullies in the country.
We'd all be safer if those who have charged Swartz were behind bars themselves.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This feels like over reaching on the prosecutor's part. Maybe to force a plea.
I thought it would be hard to screw up a case like the Casey Anthony trial but Prosecutors looking to make a reputation can surprise you by going to trial and not making a deal.
I understand his position on open data but it was the absolute wrong way to go about it.
Its a win for the prosecutor's record and saves the time of a jury trial. If Everyone charged with a crime opted for a jury the courts would be back logged for decades.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Legally it is stealing. Get over it. If you don't like it then vote, or run for office and change it. I don't really agree that it is stealing either, but that's how the law seems to treat it right now.
Regardless, he appears to be guilty of wire fraud at the very least.
Nice, fingers, nice. should read '...not a NEW concept in law.'
Who puts this much effort into something? Someone who believes it is right. Someone who is tired of seeing 6 billion people forbidden any access at any price to academic papers in electronic form, just because they are not members of a privileged guild.
Isn't it about time for Juries to use their power of Jury Nullification? Jury members can vote their conscience no matter what the law, the prosecutor or even the Judge says. Unfortunately most are told otherwise.
Perhaps your slip was apt. Does the law even recognize an overarching concept of "stealing" of which larceny, copyright infringement, and theft of network service are subclasses?
We wince when we learn of what Russia is doing to the girl punk band Pussy Riot
They way Russia heaping charges after ridiculous charges on those 3 girls causes many of us boiling mad, and our main stream media condemn what Russia is doing ... on the other hand ...
When the American government heap charges after ridiculous charges on a guy - where are the main stream media ?
The silent treatment from New York Time or Washington Post or Newsweek or Times Magazine is especially deafening.
The fate of the 3 girls of Pussy Riot is ruined by a dictatorship.
The fate of a guy in US is equally ruined - but by a so-called "democratically elected government".
Why the double standards?
Isn't the personal liberty of a guy in USA as important as the liberty of the 3 girls of Pussy Riot?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Here's the reason given in the archive for the theft/release: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR. Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19 USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a checksum file to allow you to check for corruption. ef8c02959e947d7f4e4699f399ade838431692d972661f145b782c2fa3ebcc6a sha256sum.txt I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who profit from controlling access to these works.
I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.
On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers from JSTOR.
Academic publishing is an odd system—the authors are not paid for their writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics), and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the authors must even pay the publishers.
And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals, but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.
As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The "publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.
Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would benefit by it.
Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions with outrageous subscription fees.
Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence, when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.
Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.
These particular documents are the historic back archives of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society—a prestigious scien
please read the JSTOR book, there is the whole history of how they started their operation and what and how it works.
essentially they were google books before google books. they were the first. and they are a Non-Profit entity.
the problems they ran into were massive - old paper collections of journals are riddled with missing issues, damaged pages, scribbled notes, misprints, etc. they actually had to create their own paper-library where they store 'canonical' versions of the old journals, which scholars pore over, page by page, before being allowed into the collection.
then they send the paper to the Dominican Republic or other low cost labor nations to get it scanned. Then they go and review the scans to make sure they are accurate.
they dont 'prevent worldwide dissemination', they actually provide it. they give a sliding scale of subscription prices to libraries around the world, including lower prices for developing countries (maybe even free, i cant remember). there are literally millions of people who could never access this stuff if not for JSTOR.
the problem is that they have to deal with copyright law responsibly or the publishers will crush them out of existence. they are not google, they cant just rely on the DMCA to get them out of hot water. Remember these guys started in the 90s, before Google was even really a company. They were around in the time of mp3.com --- when a single threat of a lawsuit could wipe out an entire community and valuable web resource for doing stuff that was perfectly legal. IIRC there wasn't even really a DMCA infrastructure working back then. They have to do everything 'by the book'. They cannot, for example, just pull a google and "scan first ask questions later". They would never have existed in the first place if they had that philosophy.
Now you can argue, why arent our taxpayer funded institutions providing free access to this for everyone? Good question. Why should you have to go into a library to use JSTOR? Well, it's not really up to JSTOR, it's up to the copyright holders and the US legal system. So instead of shitting all over JSTOR, please go shit all over Elsevier and the rest of the corrupted, conflicted academic publishing world.
JSTOR are relatively good guys. They are not the ones suing this kid, the Attorney General is.
JSTOR would probably love to give universal access to everyone. they love revenue because it helps them conitnue their mission, expand their collection, hire more researchers and librarians, etc. they dont control the material though. they have to act super nice and kiss a lot of ass to get what they get already. Elsevier, and others, would love to crush JSTOR like a bug.
its a DMCA case and a CFAA case. totally different laws, and TOS are pretty shaky on legal ground. The folks who try to write about this stuff get it confused all the time, because they are ignorant of the law. But thats no excuse for the rest of us to be. Go read up on the law, theres stuff all over the internet.
2. JSTOR is not suing the kid, the government is. If JSTOR did it that would be a civil suit. This is a criminal suit.
3. JSTOR is not the MAFIAA, they do not push for these kinds of laws. They have to work within the copyright system as it exists so that publishers will grant them access to reproduce the academic journals the publishers own the rights to.
you are 100% correct. indictments like this are full of horse shit and red herrings that are completely irrelevant to the case. it makes you wonder sometimes if prosecutors even know the law they are trying to uphold.
you would hope for more Joe Friday "just the facts" types doing these cases, but we seem to be perpetually stuck with DAs who analyze media strategy and decide to gussy up their indictments with irrelevant bullshit.
1. professors dont have power. at most universities, professors have become part-time hired hands with no health insurance, as the 'adjuncts' rapidly grow to dwarf the size of actual professors. tenure is a figment of the past, publish or perish, and on and on and on.
2. the 'slavish reproductions' take a lot of librarians, scholars, and workers a very long time to collect and scan, because paper archives are incomplete, damaged, full of misprints, etc etc etc. read the JSTOR book and you will understand what they had to do to make a 'canonical' archive to scan - they actually had to create their own paper library archive and then scan that, because the typical backfiles at a university library are incomplete, incorrect, badly catalogued, damaged, etc etc etc.
3. Everything before 1923 (or whatever year it is now) is in the public domain. There is no way to copyright those pages. I have taken stuff out of pre-1923 books from google books and put it on wikipedia (with a link back to google books) . There is nothing they can do to you.
AFTER 1923 US copyright law kicks in. But since you are tlaking about a UK journal, you also need to look at UK copyright. Again, maybe you think copyright is bullshit, but JSTOR does not have the luxury of philosophical purity. They had a job to do, namely to scan the worlds journals and provide access, and thats how they did it... they had to sweet talk the academic publishing monopolies (who would prefer JSTOR didnt exist) into allowing them to do what they do. They have provided access to millions of people around the world that was not possible without them. You can shit all over them all you want, but they dont control the laws. They are just trying to accomplish the same thing the libraries have been trying to accomplish all these years - disseminate knowledge for little or no cost. It is not their fault that the academic publishing houses (Elsevier, etc) abuse the system.
"If a law is unjust
And luckily everyone always agrees on which laws are just or unjust, and nothing can possibly go wrong.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It has been established (in USA at least), that creativity, not "Sweat of the Brow", is the determining factor for whether a work is copyrightable.
http://http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
As for taking other people's hard work, I give you
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service
Scans of public domain articles are NOT creative work and are NOT protected by copyright.
No valid copyrights involved here.
My question is where and what authentication happened. It sounds to me (maybe wrong) that the fraud was to access the local network and once there access to JSTOR was open. Is it wire fraud to lie to get into a club and use their free WiFi?