Re: nettime No JSTOR downloads or bicycle-helmet-masks for you
Greetings. There's been discussion here on the Swartz JSTOR situation, and I would like to weigh in on this as it relates to topics I'm rather involved with right now. Mr Smith pointed out that JSTOR is one of the nicer bunch of infogates, and for the most part he is correct. However, there are a few decidedly important failures in JSTOR and I would like to point them out. 1. you need to be in school. There is no JSTOR for poverty stricken independent researchers. As libraries continue to close down, many are cutting what little access they have to systems like JSTOR from lack of funds. Furthermore, JSTOR limits access to libraries - only older articles are available publicly. If you are in prison, you are not getting to JSTOR. 2. Money is not money. The few times I actually paid for a JSTOR article it was about $15 for a short article. Note: 2,000,000,000 (2 billion) people live on less than a dollar day. A $15 article represents about 2 weeks total wages. And to complicate things, one Mr Maxwell caught wind of the Swartz prosecution and decided to release 30 gigs worth of scientific papers into the interweb thingie by way of thepiratebay and later BtGhost. http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/07/22/2254204/Release-of-33GiB-of-Scientific-Publications Here's the link to he BtGhost torrent: http://www.btghost.com/link/89818739/ Mr Maxwell is especially focussed on documents prior to 1923. I have not been able to parse his torrent - I ran out of hard drive space... :-/ Why JSTOR charges for Curie, Bohr, and Einstein, I have no idea. None of this addresses why there are infogates at all in academia, and it points at some very foundational points in the positions held by the various axia of the debate. HW -- Message: 3 Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:20:33 -0400 From: Philip Smith phlipsm...@gmail.com To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org Subject: Re: nettime No JSTOR downloads or bicycle-helmet-masks for ??? you Message-ID: mailman.2.1311415200.20149.nettim...@mail.kein.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Of all the subscription databases out there JSTOR is among the least proprietary and dick-ish. The cost to libraries is reasonable, the content mostly historical (main subjects: literary criticism, history, economics, business, philology; it's mostly a humanities collection). I doubt much of ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime No JSTOR downloads or bicycle-helmet-masks for you
On 23/07/11 21:11, David Golumbia wrote: watch out everyone... if you're not very careful, this story may make your ideology start to show. Threatening someone with 35 years imprisonment for a case that had already been settled by the parties involved in order to send a message seems pretty ideological to me. by the way, do we academics in the activist SWARTZ'S humble judgment have the right to any compensation at all for our years of labor? If you haven't been compensated for your years of labour I suggest having a word with either your union or your HR department. and he DEFINITELY didn't intend steal. how dare you attack him for stealing. I've just checked and all the articles still seem to be on JSTOR. Nothing has been stolen. - Rob. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime No JSTOR downloads or bicycle-helmet-masks for you
I'd like to add to this that you not only have to be in school (or at a public library), but also that your city or your school has to be paying its bills. When an institution had paper copies, it retained them indefinitely, but once it forgoes paper and turns to the portal, it has to please the portal in order to have continuing access. Once the relationship is over, it seems to me that the institution is in a bad position since it no longer gets access to the journals it subscribed to digitally. On Jul 24, 2011, at 1:06 AM, h w wrote: Greetings. There's been discussion here on the Swartz JSTOR situation, and I would like to weigh in on this as it relates to topics I'm rather involved with right now. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime No JSTOR downloads or bicycle-helmet-masks for you
Of all the subscription databases out there JSTOR is among the least proprietary and dick-ish. The cost to libraries is reasonable, the content mostly historical (main subjects: literary criticism, history, economics, business, philology; it's mostly a humanities collection). I doubt much of the content is publicly funded, so there's not much sticking-it-to-the man punch in hacking JSTOR. If he really wanted to make a point about open access to publicly funded knowledge, he should of hit one of the big for-profit science/technology/medical databases from the likes of Elsevier or Sage. That's where all the money is. So I can't help thinking Mr. Schwartz's actions were a bit misguided. Of course, I have no idea what his actual intentions were; maybe he just wanted to make life easier for all those poor humanities scholars out there by giving them free journal articles? I'm all for challenging the all-too-restrictive model of scholarly communication, but hacking JSTOR is a little like attacking a kindly old uncle of the family for the greed of a slick young man. Still, the charges against him are unreasonable and obviously meant to scare and close down discussion on changing the system. Just my perspective from the library world. Philip Smith On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 6:00 AM, nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org wrote: Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to nettime-l@mail.kein.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org You can reach the person managing the list at nettime-l-ow...@mail.kein.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of nettime-l digest... Today's Topics: 1. Re: No JSTOR downloads or bicycle-helmet-masks for you (maxigas) 2. Vancouver Sun: Beijing outclasses London in managing Murdoch (michael gurstein) ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime No JSTOR downloads or bicycle-helmet-masks for you
Pretty much every comment that you can find on Aaron Swartz?s arrest, both those that praise him for sticking it to the man and those that think he a criminal, is based on the assumption that he intended to illegally redistribute these articles, that he was trying to ?liberate? information. Few have acknowledged the possibility that he was doing actual research that simply pushed JSTOR past its technical limits (so yes, he clearly violated section 2.2 f of the ToS) and that he had no intention of sharing the content he downloaded. After a half hour of very basic web research I believe that this is the case for two main reasons. 1. This reference to a previous project of Mr. Swartz?s come from the blog of Demand Prgress, an online activist group founded and formerly directed by him. ?In conjunction with Shireen Barday, he downloaded and analyzed 441,170 law review articles to determine the source of their funding; the results were published in the Stanford Law Review.? So it seems very possible that the articles or JSTOR itself were actually the subject of a research project, one that would probably have involved some kind of automated methods of analysis. http://demandprogress.org/aaron 2. Assuming he was going to release this content, how exactly would he have made these articles publicly available? This would not be like putting a pirated movie on the Pirate Bay and I really doubt that Wikileaks would want it. The reason people go to JSTOR to find articles is partly because the full text is available there, but mostly because they are searchable in several ways, sortable by discipline, filterable by type, etc. Without an enormous amount of metadata and a specialized search engine to use it, finding anything in a heap of several million articles is way beyond a needle in a haystack. A simple keyword search would be fairly easy to implement and of some use but no replacement for the work of the many catalogers and software engineers that really make JSTOR the valuable resource that it is. The point is, the logistics of making this trove of information useful and available are huge. Such a huge mess of data would be very difficult to use as a compressed and scattered file on a torrent and how else could this volume of copyrighted material really be put out there for public consumption? Obviously Aaron Swartz is quite a bit more visionary in these matters than I, and perhaps he had an ingenious plan for thwarting the IP watchdogs or is a member of a cabal of nefarious programmers and librarians, striving to create the shadow JSTOR. I find it easier to accept that he simply needed more data faster than JSTOR would give it. He had legitimate access to the information, just not that much of it in that short a time. That he approached this problem in a prankish and ultimately unproductive manner is true but not the issue that the Feds are after him for. JSTOR has forgiven the violation of the terms of service and MIT has settled the trespassing and damage claims and neither is pressing any charges. The criminal charges appear to stem from his assumed intentions for the material, an assumption that even his supporters seem willing to go along with. Based on his past work I think that it?s a questionable one. Anyway that?s my perspective, also, I suppose, from the library world. PS. After writing the above, I found this: http://gigaom.com/2011/07/21/pirate-bay-jstor/ While I agree with what Greg Maxwell did and says about it, it still doesn?t tell us anything about Aaron Swartz?s intentions. On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 1:20 PM, Philip Smith phlipsm...@gmail.com wrote: Of all the subscription databases out there JSTOR is among the least proprietary and dick-ish. The cost to libraries is reasonable, the content mostly historical (main subjects: literary criticism, history, economics, business, philology; it's mostly a humanities collection). I doubt much of ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime No JSTOR downloads or bicycle-helmet-masks for you
watch out everyone... if you're not very careful, this story may make your ideology start to show. by the way, do we academics in the activist SWARTZ'S humble judgment have the right to any compensation at all for our years of labor? or is that some kind of work that has become outmoded altogether, unlike the very very cool and respectable work of breaking into a relatively unsecured system? whatever the case, i am thrilled to have given up the judgment to the famous SWARTZ and endorse his efforts 100%. it may be old hat, but some may be interested to know that JSTOR is not all that rigorous about policing copyright with regard to individual authors (who, btw, have typically not been paid in any direct way for the results of what may be years of labor), and as far as i know has never acted against a professor who puts copies of his or her own research on their own private or university website for free/open distribution to anyone, including the whole world. forget all that. the principle for which SWARTZ is acting is unimpeachable, and thus merits at least 24 hours of assumption on nettime-l that any sane person would sign a petition for him. for the principle. what is the principle again? and he DEFINITELY didn't intend steal. how dare you attack him for stealing. NOT ONE STORY oh wait... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime No JSTOR downloads or bicycle-helmet-masks for you
http://goo.gl/SiGGj (PDF) In all, [Aaron] Swartz stole approximately 4.8 million articles, a major portion of the total archive in which JSTOR had invested... Swartz intended to distribute a significant portion of JSTOR's archive of digitized journal articles through one or more file-sharing sites And finally, 36. The Grand Jury realleges and incorporates by reference the allegations in paragraphs 1-33 of this Indictment and charges that: From on or about September 24, 2010, through January 6, 2011, or thereabout, in the District of Massachusetts and elsewhere, the defendant, AARON SWARTZ, intentionally accessed a computer -- namely, a computer on MIT's computer network and a computer on JSTOR's network -- without authorization and in excess of authorized access, and thereby obtained from a protected computer information whose value exceeded $5,000 -- namely, digitized journal articles from JSTOR's archive --- and aided and abetted the same. All in violation of 18 U.S.C. ?? 1030(a)(2), (c)(2)(B)(iii) and 2. -- Pranesh Prakash Programme Manager Centre for Internet and Society W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
