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How Scientists Are Circumventing Journal Paywalls (bbc.co.uk)
Bruce66423 writes: Some academics are fighting back against publishers of academic journals by providing copies of papers to researchers who don't have access. For some reason, the publishers aren't happy! Cognitive scientist Andrea Kuszewski said, "Basically you tweet out a link to the paper that you need, with the hashtag and then your email address. And someone will respond to your email and send it to you." That begins the conversation, and then the scientists cover their tracks: "Once contact is made, all subsequent conversation is kept off of social media — instead, scientists correspond via email. The original tweet is deleted, so there's no public record of the paper changing hands. Kuszewski and others say the method is necessary to get up-to-date research in the hands of academics from developing countries, and her and other scientists say they consider the pirating 'civil disobedience' against a system that includes for-profit publishing companies."
Due to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act law he was looking at $1 million in fines and / or 35 years in prison. And he took the suicide way out.
Now with the TPP things can be just as bad or worse.
Why would Libertarians oppose this? Most oppose Intellectual Monopoly laws. Now if you had a contract with a publisher that you wouldn't republish I guess that could hurt your reputation but there shouldn't be anything illegal about it.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Speaking as a scientist this activity has a certain whiff of hypocrisy about it though. If we all published our papers in open access journals, which is now almost ubiquitous in particle physics, there would be no need to smuggle copies of papers to anyone and then even those who lack the contacts or are concerned about legal repercussions can read the papers too. It also helps to undermine the increasingly oppressive copyright laws which governments are foisting on all of us.
The papers author may want their cut too
The authors of journal articles actually pay the publisher, not the other way around.
Yeah, I feel just awful for those poor, poor double-dipping parasites, can you tell?
He broke the law very blatantly. He had other tools available to accomplish the same ends but opted for the one that was maximally disruptive and maximally destructive.
So did the North American Colonies and their Continental Army.
My understanding is that a lot of scientific work are funded via public money, yet the copyright gets assigned to private entities. In the context of copying vs. 'taking', their behavior is closer to 'taking' than what the researchers are doing. Simply because they prevent access to it by others.
If viewed as a public "investment", limiting access to the knowledge actually reduces the "payback" by not spreading the findings to anyone who wants it. This in turn probably lowers overall quality by having fewer (and perhaps less qualified) people examining the findings.
The above arguments hinges on it being publically funded research.
Personally I value that the researchers are more interested in spreading knowledge and solving real problems than adhering to something as byzantine and riduculus as the current copyright laws. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" was their stated purpose; when they are clearly retarding progress what is the solution? Reform them? Or get your work done, for the benefit of all of humanity?
Maybe at the very least we need an exception, like fair use for scientific purposes?
I never understood comments like yours.
Just because someone is not willing to stand trial or "accept the consequences" for their actions doesn't invalidate their initial actions.
Civil disobedience doesn't somehow become morally wrong because you don't want to go to trial, "face the music", or allow yourself to be arrested. The idea is that by breaking some laws, you call attention to the injustice of those laws. Getting arrested may or may not help with that, but it has nothing to do with whether or not the law was wrong in the first place.
If Rosa Parks had decided not to allow herself to be arrested and fought back physically against the cops who arrested her, she likely would have been violently arrested, even beaten, but that would not have invalidated her initial refusal to move from her seat.
Edward Snowden's disseminating of the information he took from the NSA is valuable information everyone needs to know about how our government spies on its own citizens. His running from the law has nothing whatsoever to do with that; that information is valuable to all Americans whether or not he broke the law, so why do we care if he "faces the music"?