Aaron Swartz Indictment Leading People To... Upload JSTOR Research To File Sharing Sites
from the backfiring dept
If it's true that Aaron Swartz's foray into an MIT computer wiring closet was as part of a project to copy JSTOR research and upload it to file sharing sites for open access, then I imagine part of the government's rationale for going after him would be the hope that it would act as a deterrent against anyone else doing the same thing. Of course, as I've pointed out with the feds' attempt to arrest members of Anonymous, it seems likely that this move will backfire in a big bad way. All it does is draw much more attention to the original goal. Indeed, Adam points us to the news that a guy by the name of Greg Maxwell just released 33GB of JSTOR scientific papers via The Pirate Bay because of the indictment against Aaron. In this case, believe it or not, it's all public domain research, which JSTOR is trying to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to access. Since I have no idea if the content will remain where it is, I'm publishing the entire note explaining what's in the documents and why they're being published. It's very much worth reading and redistributing his message. The bold emphasis is from me, highlighting what I believe are the important points:-----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 cheaplyas $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 scientific journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.
The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some 18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.
The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind, and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.
When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, Wikisource--where they could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of other papers he authored?)
But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing: publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation from the publishers.
As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish reproduction--scanning the documents--created a new copyright interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.
In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is legally and morally everyone's property.
In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary, the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archives--but "free" only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about 100 articles.
All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not disseminators of knowledge--as their lofty mission statements suggest--but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence competition.
The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued survival may even depend on it.
If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding, then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified--it will be one less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers a crime.
I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.
I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful applications which come of this archive.
- ----
Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011
gmaxwell@gmail.com Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEARECAAYFAk4nlfwACgkQrIWTYrBBO/pK4QCfV/voN6IdZRU36Vy3xAedUMfz rJcAoNF4/QTdxYscvF2nklJdMzXFDwtF =YlVR
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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Filed Under: aaron swartz, academic research, copyright, greg maxwell, knowledge
Companies: jstor, the pirate bay
Reader Comments
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...I've been playing too many FPSes.
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Who the fuck am I kidding, we are dealing with US politicians and the US legal system. never mind ...
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The laws being proposed, and currently on the books in various nations, will highlight that fact. France's Hadopi law is a perfect example of this. Half the household in France infringe on copyright, and that is not going to change. Currently hadopi has tracked down 18 million file sharers, if thats a 1 to 1 ration with house holds thats about half the households in France.
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(sry, couldn't resist)
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this guy has huge balls, and the brains to back it up.
You have my sword, sir!
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this guy has huge balls, and the brains to back it up.
You have my sword, sir!
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(I know it's over a year old but it still cracks me up.)
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HAX!
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"My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."
to this:
"My name is Greg Maxwell. Your academic publishing monopoly has killed 'To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.' Prepare to die, by Public Domain."
Seems appropriate to me.
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Original Quote:
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means due to industry lobbying efforts."
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I salute him and his principled stand against the attempt to lock up knowledge behind a walled garden where only the privileged and wealthy can gain access.
Godspeed to you, Greg Maxwell. You deserve every bit of praise that can possibly be given to you.
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Especially when the summary doesn't always give you enough information to tell whether the research is going to be suited to your needs. I recall paying $20 for an article that seemed promising - only to discover that the part that interested me was two paragraphs, poorly supported, at the very end of the three page article.
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Advice and small correction
As for it " backfire(ing) in a big bad way" its backfired, Streisand effect style, in a very big and GOOD way.
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This is America.
Of course there's a court that could.
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You say that now, but they already did. See the Lexis Nexus/WestLaw cases. They took old cases from the public domain, added page numbers and then claimed copyright.
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But see Matthew Bender v West Publishing. In summary (it was a complicated litigation):
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http://www.plos.org/
and
http://arxiv.org/
and
http://www.doaj.org/
and
http://www.ope njgate.com/
and also
the wikipedia article on "open access", which discusses others in addition to these.
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But one that doesn't exist yet is one that is maintained but the cloud, something like OMEMO(i.e. P2P storage) but for research papers.
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If you want to take the lead on that project I'll join forces and bring the forces I have for my start up site to help you as much as we can.
examiner6k@yahoo.com
Eventually, if you don't get it done, I will add it on to my site if the "main course" of my site catches on and makes $$$. Or at least breaks even.
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We don't need new software, we need tax payers to demands access to the publications they fund.
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2. Greg Maxwell's a bloody hero.
3. But can I download the torrent? No, because my ISP has sensibly blocked access to Pirate Bay. Only thieves and criminals use it anyway, right? :-|
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But you assumed I was trying to stick it to them by downloading 33 gigs I didn't want. That's not what I meant, but I guess I phrased it badly. But listen, your interpretation? It's goddamn stupid! You get that, right? I mean, you clearly thought I was stupid when you figured that was my motivation, right? But it's really bloody dumb!
Lookit,
a) If I wanted to stick it to my ISP, I'd stop paying them with money that covers whatever bandwidth costs I incur on them, plus.
b) If I were to download that torrent, it'd be for my enrichment. Not my profit, or my revenge, or any cruel motivations. Just to indulge my natural curiosity about the development of science and history of philosophy.
Your reading though, jeez. It was stupid.
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So, if, er, out of the blue, you say you want to download 33 gigabytes of DULL material, I supply an answer.
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I've read a few of your posts. I am *so* glad I'm not in your head.
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If it's dull, why did Greg download the archives in the first place? If it's dull, why did he think anyone would care about his sharing it? If it's dull, why do people typically need to pay (and pay a lot) to get access to it? If it's dull, why's the journal still going, heck why was it started at all?
...And that's why your comment was stupid.
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These are the full articles from the "Proceedings of the Royal Society of London" since it's conception.
I mean it's the Western Worlds holy grail of Scientific history.
I for one are currently downloading it and am considering placing it online using a searchable database. Especially since it is absolutely Public Domain, no matter what metatags, et.al have been applied to it, and is invaluable for any current or future human to understand the cultural history of Western Science and Philosophy!
If the US Govt, or even JSTOR want to come after me for doing this, or even downloading it, i relish the opportunity to send them packing, not least that the US govt, nor JSTOR have any ability to even think they have any ownership or rights in this information. If anything it is owned by all citizens of the Commonwealth which America decided to remove themselves from way back in 1776. Though I, and the Statute of Anne, both state that it s owned by the citizens of the world. Ie: Public property!
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When he is finished, our network works so much better. Those vuvuzellas, they are magic. Who would have thought that they were such an essential piece of network maintenance gear?
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2. I couldn't agree more.
3. Magnet link. Alternatively, one of the comments on the page linked to a copy of the torrent here.
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If these documents aren't publicly available without JSTOR...
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Re: If these documents aren't publicly available without JSTOR...
welcome to the internet, enjoy your stay
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Re: Re: Information wants to be "free", as in "ADVERTISEMENT FREE"
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Not ads in the articles, genius. Ads on the web site that makes the articles available.
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Re: If these documents aren't publicly available without JSTOR...
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Re: Re: If these documents aren't publicly available without JSTOR...
You don't understand Nina's Cartoon. We don't hire the guards or build walls. We have the government do that for us. We only charge for access. http://goo.gl/57FO1
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Re: If these documents aren't publicly available without JSTOR...
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Re: If these documents aren't publicly available without JSTOR...
You have no clue what Librarians actually do. Consider that fact that there are masters and phd programs in Library Sciences. I'm sorry but I don't think those programs cover how to turn on and off a light or keeping a computer running. But it is about catalogging information in a meaningful way. The more that the information is open and access to all, the more there skill is needed to help direct others seeking the information.
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Re: If these documents aren't publicly available without JSTOR...
However, if the information is truly freely available, then JSTOR should absolutely not have exclusive access to it. Lock it up. Charge a trillion dollars. And nobody will come.
There are plenty of other parties that would be happy to store, serve, pay bandwidth costs, catalog and index this, "keeping the lights on" as you say -- and do it for free. (Probably an advertising based model.)
> there /should/ be /some/ fee paid to the librarians
> for services seems absolutely solid.
Wrong.
They could charge for access like JSTOR does (but something reasonable). Or some generous donor might fund it. Or they might put ads on web pages that serve it.
There is no absolute rule or reason that people should have to pay to access this data.
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Re: Re: If these documents aren't publicly available without JSTOR...
"...and while I certainly object to the /high price/..."
2nd, there's apparently no other source for these.
And to various: part of the "librarian" work was presumably in scanning them from physical documents. They didn't just walk a Tri-Corder through and get it all magically online.
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...and this was addressed by the Supreme Court as "Sweat of the brow" and not eligible for copyright protection.
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2. That's a good point. Nonetheless, it is no different than PACER erecting a paywall to public court documents.
If JSTOR makes those documents available, and JSTOR has no copyright -- then they have no case of "infringement".
I can very much understand that JSTOR may not like this.
JSTOR may once have served a purpose. In the computer and internet age, they don't. At least not at those prices.
At any price, someone can pay the price, access the documents, and turn around and make them available. If the issue is one person downloading too much, then more people will coordinate to do it. If the download limits are severe, then they'll do it slowly.
Maybe they'll do something clever like RECAP is for PACER. Anyone running the RECAP plugin in their browser who vists PACER automatically uploads the (public domain) PACER documents to RECAP at which point they are now available to all for free. It may take awhile, but all those public domain documents will be available for free.
I'm sorry if you don't like it. Or if JSTOR doesn't like it. But they don't have a legal case to go after Aaron. You can try to grasp for straws of a legal claim, but people will make this information available for free. It was only a matter of time.
The higher their price, the sooner the time comes.
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Uh, yeah, that's the problem. There SHOULD be other sources to these public domain works, but JSTOR has it locked up.
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"you're just plain saying that librarians don't deserve to be paid."
Deserve's got nothing to do with it.
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Re: If these documents aren't publicly available without JSTOR...
You realise you just justified the Pirate Bay and similar sites running ads and recieving donations, right? We knew you'd get it eventually.
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Re: If these documents aren't publicly available without JSTOR...
A Library is a public institution. Look up the definition of public, and what Tertiary Learning Institutions are supposed to be all about.
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�I have sympathy for the position that distribution costs money and that those costs should be supported by people who value the work... What I don�t have sympathy for is the position that making a century-old document available costs nearly $20 every single time it is accessed.�
URL: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/user-posts-thousands-of-jstor-files-online/32378
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Awesome
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What do you mean by destroyed?
What is your point?
This seems like making the Library of Alexandria even more widely available to anyone. Nothing is being destroyed.
If all of a sudden JSTOR can't make money because people can get this data elsewhere, then JSTOR is obviously not providing anything of value. Some argue that they are providing a service "keeping the lights on", "indexing", "collating", etc. But if people stop coming to JSTOR, then obviously nobody needed this.
We live in the age of computers and the internet.
Maybe JSTOR once served a purpose. But so did the horse and buggy.
If JSTOR can't survive with this information out in the public where it belongs, then good riddance.
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Also, JSTOR isn't the great villain some people here are making it out to be. You should blame the *publishers*.
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We need about 10,000 more people just like this...
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LHCb
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Re: LHCb
I agree that specialised open resource places like scoap3.org and the even bigger http://ssrn.com/ are not only needed but a necessity nowadays for allowing the freeflow of information in scientific and non-scientific communities worldwide.
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Best ever
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Interesting this should come up now
The point is, this sort of thing is the natural human reaction to horrific abuse of power. Even if you give the copyright lobbyists all the laws they want, even if the punishment is spending the rest of your life in prison or worse, it won't stop people from doing something if they believe in it strongly enough. Using the government to threaten those who oppose you may scare some into inaction, but it will strengthen the resolve of others. How many people can you threaten or sue or send to jail before the people have had all they can take? That's what those in charge of all these legacy copyright industries should be asking themselves. Because once we reach that point they'll look back fondly on the days when copying was the only thing they worried about.
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Re: Interesting this should come up now
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Wait, I am. Never mind.
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A thought on archiving
It's rather ironic. People take time to vilify filesharing networks for being more efficient ways of distributing data and now, it's being used to archive data that was cooped up in a bottle like a genie.
So when are we going to destroy any libraries for the sake of Barnes and Noble making more money?
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http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2009/133/857/2009-133857105-06a32823-9.pdf
Th eir CEO had a total compensation in 2009 of $411,340.
They have about 65 million dollars in net assets, almost all of it being cash and investments (i.e. very little in land and office equipment).
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In JSTOR's case, they pass a lot of profit onto publishers. Who make a fat buck for . . . essentially nothing.
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Wow
Instead, I'll just help seed his torrent and send some bitcoins his way.
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Gentlemen i salute science day
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I am proud to be called human today...
Was avoiding bitcoin but now am gonna have to go find some and 30Gb space on my NAS to help seed from.
Public Domain should be free (as in knowledge) and able to be freed (as in beer).
Points to you sir!
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However, it is unfair that we let Greg Maxwell fight alone. Those of us who feel Greg Maxwell stands for something important ought to do what we can to support this cause, even if it isn't much.
Having studied science as an undergrad, I am disgusted by the peer-reviewed journals and I find it appalling that Science could be locked away from people like that.
Science is supposed to have credibility because every study and experiment is supposed to be documented and accessible. Plenty of teachers have told me "You obviously can't know everything, but you can trust your textbooks and expert's authority because if in doubt about anything, you can just check the original sources they refer to, and you'll see the information in your textbook is correct".
Without the ability to check original sources, this all falls apart.
We should start questioning every claim made by scientists, solely as a matter of principle. "You say the Earth is round? I don't believe you, I don't have access to the sources and the evidence you refer to." Hopefully this will make the authors of these articles realize the problem is important and they'll move to change the way publication works. Experts hate nothing more than having their authority questioned.
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In the meantime I bypass any paywalled papers and only reference whats freely available, becuase Im certainly not going to pay 20$ for a 100 papers to find the ones I am really after.
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Who will pay
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sluts
Our academia is a feckless, mindless, slutty epiphenomenon of capitalism amok. Just as the Net was getting the traction to become a universal library, a few smart greedy guys saw their main chance. Created a business model that worked for them, primarily by creating an artificial scarcity that allowed academic publishers to remain mindlessly printing their journals instead of being challenged to find ways to become entirely present digitally, and accessible to all. Micropayments if necessary, but hardly necessary to pay 8 JSTOR execs over $250,000 a year to "execute" this extortion scheme. Feh.
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A new advert
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