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:

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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

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Filed Under: aaron swartz, academic research, copyright, greg maxwell, knowledge
Companies: jstor, the pirate bay

Exploit On Hadopi Site Turns It Into Pirate Bay Supporter

from the guilty-until-proven-innocent dept

Hadopi, the French agency set up to enforce France's three strikes and you're kicked off the internet policy, apparently isn't very good at securing their own website. Someone found a simple XSS vulnerability and set up a page where Hadopi was promoting the Pirate Bay with an integrated search. Of course, lots of sites end up with XSS vulnerabilities. It's often tough to avoid them (and yes, we've been caught with them a few at times). But, the reason why this is especially ironic is that part of Hadopi's position is that if you fail to secure your internet access point, you're still liable for the actions of users on that access point. Thus, it's not a stretch to argue that Hadopi is, by its own rules, liable for any infringement that may have occurred via its own site, right? Perhaps Hadopi should kick itself off the internet.

Filed Under: exploit, hadopi, xss
Companies: hadopi, the pirate bay

Swedish Government Helps Fund Documentary On The Pirate Bay

from the nice-of-them dept

Even as some in the Swedish government -- at the urging of US diplomats and the US entertainment industry -- continue to look for ways to shut down The Pirate Bay, it appears that the Swedish government is funding part of the documentary on The Pirate Bay. This is from the same movie that was able to raise some money last year via Kickstarter. To be honest, getting some government funds isn't that strange. The various Scandanavian countries tend to have pretty strong government support for the arts. When I was there about a year ago, many of the discussions I had with artists was how the situation there is quite different than in the US in that almost every filmmaker or musician expects to get some kind of government funding at some point or another. Still, given the controversial nature of The Pirate Bay within Sweden, it's still worth noting that the government was still willing to support the documentary.

Filed Under: documentary, funding, movies, sweden
Companies: the pirate bay

Leaked State Department Cable Shows 'Behind The Scenes' US Embassy Involvement In Swedish Copyright Issues

from the no-surprise-there dept

It's long been common knowledge that US diplomats have had a heavy hand in other country's copyright laws but, with the Wikileaks release of State Department cables, we're finally seeing some actually confirmation of that. We've already covered the US's involvement in Spain's proposed copyright changes and now a Swedish television station claims to have a cable (not yet released by Wikileaks) that shows heavy "behind the scenes" involvement by the US Embassy in Swedish copyright law. The key points are that the US diplomat admits that public perception is (quite accurately) that the raid and subsequent trial of The Pirate Bay was due to pressure from the US government and that public perception was in favor of The Pirate Bay and against the US government's position on copyright law. Thus, "this delicate situation made it difficult, if not counter-productive, for the Embassy to play a public role on IPR issues. Behind the scenes, the Embassy has worked well with all stakeholders."

Why do I get the feeling that "all stakeholders" seemed to leave out the public and actual content consumers who were (as stated) very much against the US government's position on copyright laws. However, the cable also lays out six specific items that the US Embassy hoped the Swedish government would follow through on with regards to copyright law... and apparently five of the six have since been implemented. So despite the public being very much against these ideas, the US government (at the urging of the US entertainment industry) directly meddled in Swedish copyright policy.

Filed Under: copyright, sweden, the pirate bay, us embassy, wikileaks
Companies: the pirate bay, wikileaks

As The Pirate Bay Guys Lose Their Appeal, When Does Google Regret Not Coming To Their Defense?

from the search-engines... dept

As you probably already know, last Friday (while we were enjoying some much needed time off), the Swedish appeals court upheld the lower court's ruling against the four guys the entertainment industry claims were behind The Pirate Bay. The appeals court shortened the jail sentences, but increased the fines that each had to pay (one of the original four guys, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, missed this trial, but will be tried again separately). I don't think anyone watching the two trials is all that surprised by the outcome -- though, if you look at the details, it certainly suggests a court and law enforcement system that still has no clue concerning what it was actually dealing with. One of the defendants, Peter, has a rather interesting blog post (Google translation from the original Swedish) in which he details a number of blatant factual errors made by the courts in the latest ruling. I'm sure that those who dislike The Pirate Bay will not pay attention to what he has to say and will assume he is lying. But it does appear that much of the ruling against Peter is based on a pretty blatant misunderstanding of basic technology, blaming him for things it's unlikely he had anything to do with whatsoever.

What strikes me about this ruling -- and Homeland Security's seizure of a bunch of domain names, which I'll cover in a later post -- is that at some point, I believe Google is going to regret not getting involved on the side of The Pirate Bay in this trial. It's obvious why they did that. Google is already having enough trouble with the entertainment industry, and The Pirate Bay is still seen as sort of radioactive when it comes to these discussions. Supporting The Pirate Bay was simply not politically possible. In fact, Google went the other direction and tried to specifically distance itself from The Pirate Bay. Yet, for all intents and purposes, The Pirate Bay was also a search engine. A specialized one, but really no different in important respects than Google. The specific points that got The Pirate Bay in trouble could all be equally applied to a general purpose search engine like Google. And with Google already dealing with executives given prison sentences due to its services in other countries, you'd think it would be a bit more sensitive to realizing the slippery slope created when you send someone to jail for the way a search engine is used.

Filed Under: copyright, liability, search engines, sweden, the pirate bay
Companies: google, the pirate bay

Richard Dawkins Points Fan To The Pirate Bay To See His Latest Documentary

from the there's-always-a-way dept

TorrentFreak points out that Prof. Richard Dawkins doesn't seem to have a problem with The Pirate Bay. When someone from Australia asked in a comment on his website about viewing his latest documentary, Dawkins responded by pointing to a variety of links, including YouTube and The Pirate Bay, suggesting those as a way to watch the video: Always nice to see rather famous people apparently not having a problem with people viewing their works via technically "unauthorized" means.

Filed Under: documentary, file sharing, richard dawkins
Companies: the pirate bay

Movie Debuts In Theater And On The Pirate Bay (On Purpose)

from the with-a-nice-message dept

Often, when we talk about films that creators choose to share via BitTorrent, one of the snarky comments we'll get is that they only did this because they couldn't get the film into a theater. So it's interesting to see that the filmmakers behind the new Swedish film Die Beauty have decided to release the film in theaters and on The Pirate Bay at the same time.

Most interesting of all may be the statement of the filmmaker, about the power of using BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay to reach a wider audience -- and how all the works of filmmakers in the past who never got the attention they deserved can now have a new life:

"Sometimes I think about all the filmmakers and musicians who passed away. Those who never got to be a part of the world wide web. No matter how hard they worked or no matter how much money they put into distribution, they couldnt reach more than a small part ofthe world.

Now their work have the opportunity to get new life. The possibility to be rediscovered by a new generation. A new world. To reject that,to prevent that from happening, is a sin. I think Charlie Chaplin would have one thing to say to all those people who do: Idiots.

Die Beauty is my first feature and releasing the film here is an obvious thing to do. And the fact that The Pirate Bay decided to give the film a world wide premiere on the frontpage makes me speechless. It's a privilege to be able to introduce the film to the greatest audience in the world."

Nice to see more filmmakers embracing what's possible, rather than hating what's possible.

Filed Under: attention, debut, movies, sweden
Companies: the pirate bay

Funding To Edit 200 Hours Of Pirate Bay Documentary Footage Raised In Just Three Days

from the but-pirates-want-everything-for-free!!!! dept

A bunch of folks have been sending over the news that filmmaker Simon Klose was attempting to raise $25,000 in order to hire a professional editor to edit down over 200 hours of footage Simon had filmed of The Pirate Bay's founders over the period of the last couple of years. In his intro pitch, he pointed out that some thought it was strange that he was making a movie about an organization that many in the movie industry hated. But, Simon, of course, points out that such a response is silly. The industry and the market have changed, and there are new avenues to raising funds -- such as directly via a platform like Kickstarter. What's really impressive though is that it only took three days to raise the funds, and there are still over three more weeks to go, and the amount raised keeps going up.

In an interview about the fundraising process, Klose points out that it's not at all surprising that people who support things like The Pirate Bay would support his film, because he was offering them something they actually wanted to support:

I think it's natural that you support stuff you believe in. The people who support our movie obviously don't believe in the services that the movie and record industries are offering them. To me it's much more ironic that the corporations are claiming that the system used to be just and beneficial to artists before the internet came around. It never was.

And, of course, Klose fully intends to release the movie via The Pirate Bay (as well as by DVD). When asked about how he feels about people file sharing his movie, he notes:

Filesharing is great marketing, I don't mind people marketing my work.

Filed Under: crowdfunding, documentary, movie, simon klose
Companies: the pirate bay

Dear Hans Pandeya: Buying A Website Involves More Than Just Saying You're Going To Buy It...

from the just-so-you-know... dept

Hans Pandeya is the guy who, as head of GGF, last year made a big splash by supposedly agreeing to buy The Pirate Bay as part of a plan that never made any sense to try to "legitimize" it. It wasn't long before many folks realized that the whole thing seemed questionable, and there were all sorts of allegations of insider trading and other questionable behavior in the sale. And, of course, as people waited for the one thing that mattered (the money) it became clear that the deal was falling through.

A few months back, however, Pandeya showed up again, this time in the US rather than Sweden, with a new company called Business Marketing Services, which was the result of Pandeya taking over the OTC stock symbol of an effectively defunct penny stock. However, he claimed he was still buying The Pirate Bay, supposedly from GGF -- except of course, GGF never actually owned The Pirate Bay, so the whole thing appeared to be a joke. Pandeya took exception to our coverage, demanded we correct the errors in the post, though he refused to explain what was in error. He also told us that he had "put the acquisition on hold," which is a funny thing to say when there's no evidence that there was any actual acquisition in the first place.

It looks like Pandeya's at it again, telling TorrentFreak that he's buying the BitTorrent community Demonoid. But, again, this appears to be wishful thinking. Demonoid hasn't agreed to any deal. Pandeya appears to be representing GGF again, and claims he now has money. It's not clear what happened to "Business Marketing Services," of course. Pandeya still talks big, saying he'd still like to acquire The Pirate Bay and IsoHunt, and claims that this time he's got money -- but he's said that before and these things haven't panned out.

So, a basic tip for Mr. Pandeya: talking about buying a website is not the same as actually buying that website. Also, saying you have cash is not the same as actually having the cash. So far, we've seen lots of claims from Mr. Pandeya, but no real follow through, so it's difficult to believe that this time around it will be any different.

Filed Under: hans pandeya
Companies: business marketing services, demonoid, ggf, the pirate bay

Pirate Bay Typo Squatter Applies For US Trademark On Pirate Bay As Well

from the use-in-commerce? dept

It should be no surprise that various malicious typo squatters have targeted The Pirate Bay with fake sites that try to install malware, however Torrentfreak looked a bit deeper and found that one of the typo squatters, a company called BladeBook, appears to be trying to trademark the actual name, as well. Apparently, BladeBook's Craig Pratka first filed for the trademark the same day that it was announced that The Pirate Bay had been sold to GGF, a deal that eventually fell apart (as did the initial trademark application).

However, the guy appears to have refiled a trademark application on "Pirate Bay" and "Pirates Bay" earlier this year, describing the business as:

Provision of telecommunications access and links to computer databases, computer networks and the Internet, namely, providing users online access via a website to third party websites featuring downloadable audio-visual media content in the nature of full-length, partial-length, and clips from motion pictures, television programming, sports events, videos, music videos, music, and interactive games. FIRST USE: 20020611. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20070111

This isn't the first time this has happened of course. Last year we wrote about someone else trying to trademark the logo. And while some who don't understand trademark law think that this is "fair game," considering the amount of unauthorized file sharing facilitated by The Pirate Bay, that misses the point. The folks behind The Pirate Bay have never had any problem with people using their logo or name or anything. What they do have a problem with is someone trying to lock it up so that others can't use it. That seems entirely consistent. Also, since trademarks are an entirely different type of law from copyrights, the comparison doesn't fully work either, since trademarks are supposed to be about preventing consumer confusion.

Filed Under: trademark, typosquatter
Companies: the pirate bay