
JSTOR Liberator sets public domain academic articles free - ryanwatkins
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/aaron-swartz-memorial-jstor-liberator-sets-public-domain-academic-articles-free/
======
politician
"By running the script ... a public domain academic article is downloaded to
the user’s computer, then uploaded back to ArchiveTeam in a small act of
protest against JSTOR's restrictive policies." -- Ars

"At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in
the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by
the owners and creators of that content." -- JSTOR

The contention that JSTOR is acting as a faithful steward of public domain
works -- having established any sort of restriction or barrier to prevent the
public from accessing those works -- truly examines the widths and depths and
bounds of intellectual dishonesty.

~~~
MichaelSalib
Digitizing public domain articles is free now? Like, scanners are free and the
people who operate them work for free?

Isn't it better for a non-profit entity to digitize PD articles and make them
available to the world at a reasonable price? Or would you prefer a world
where JSTOR didn't exist and the only people who had access to most old PD
documents where those who lived in major western cities near the biggest
libraries?

~~~
rayiner
JSTOR is such a bizarre target to pick.

1) Some of the articles on JSTOR are the product of complete public funding.
But many are not. Many are the result of partial or complete university
funding.

2) All the work of editing the underlying journals, which is very time
consuming, is generally not publicly funded.

3) All of the work of digitizing those journal articles is not free. When
Google undertakes to digitize such content, they charge you by selling your
privacy to others. JSTOR just asks you to pay a fee for their service. Who is
the bad guy here?

~~~
rhizome
It doesn't have to be "complete" public funding. I'm gonna go ahead and guess
that many, many of the universities that may have partially funded the
research also receive tax dollars. This last part is such a huge issue here, I
think. "Well it wasn't _very many_ tax dollars..." Yeah, well let's have our
share then. One download of each document that tax dollars helped pay for
seems fair to me.

~~~
sp332
Let's say a university is going to do some research. They look around for
funds and decide to do a project that the government is offering some grant
money for. In that case, the government's money didn't really pay for the
research, it just influenced what direction it went. I think the grant money
did its intended job even if the results aren't public.

~~~
rhizome
Well, does the study use tax-paid resources or not? It may not seem _workable_
that no private results should result from research receiving tax-money in any
way, but it is _fair_.

~~~
sp332
I guess what I mean is, sometimes the grant money is to "buy" the results of
research, and sometimes it's just to encourage research along certain lines.
Or anything else... Think of it this way: if the government requires all
publicly-funded research results to be public, a lot less people are going to
take them up on the deal.

~~~
rhizome
_if the government requires all publicly-funded research results to be public,
a lot less people are going to take them up on the deal._

Non-sequitur, and you can bet plenty of researchers will publish publicly in
order to get free money. What it _will_ affect is _private industry_
benefitting from publicly funded research _and resources_.

~~~
sp332
But if private industry profits less from the research, they will pay less for
it. Pretty quickly you will see two exclusive sets appear: a little open
research funded with a little public money, and lots of proprietary research
funded with lots of private money.

~~~
rhizome
I don't think it would be as complete as you imagine. There would be companies
who would forego keeping results private to save the expense of building their
own lab facilities and hiring people to run and work in them. That public
resources can be used for private results is a back-door subsidy for commerce.

------
kanzure
I am trying to collect small hacks like this that are popping up. I know
everyone writes scrapers, but hardly anyone talks about it. But maybe talking
about it would be helpful so that we can figure out what goes right and what
goes wrong:

<https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front>

Someone contributed a small greasemonkey script that does something similar to
the JSTOR memorial liberator, except for SpringerLink previews.

<https://gist.github.com/4535401>

~~~
merinid
You're right. everyone writes scrapers. Heck Google is just one huge scraper.
It's what you do with the data (and in some cases, what you _might_ intend to
do with the data) that counts.

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general_failure
Just because something is in public domain doesn't mean it's free.
Shakespear's works might be public domain but there is a cost to printing a
book. There is a cost to scanning pages, there is a cost to hosting a website,
administering a website etc.

How hard is this logic to understand? If you don't want to use JSTOR don't use
it. Don't go around saying they should let you download it for free.

~~~
jlgreco
You can buy a copy of Shakespeare's works and then upload a copy of the text
to Project Gutenberg.

Just because someone is selling something that is public domain doesn't mean
that you can't give it away for free.

------
darkarmani
Unfortunately, I can see this pounding JSTOR's site. I'm sure US Attorney
Carmen Ortiz will think this is a DDoS attack because JSTOR can't handle the
traffic generated by everyone going there.

I'm sure she can rationalize that as a terrorist attack on essential
infrastructure, so let's round it up to 170 years in jail for the
conspirators. Let's assume every one of those connections would have paid $200
for an article,so that's $50 million in damages. Right?

~~~
res0nat0r
Sigh. It is getting very old to see HN comments degenerating into
Techdirt/Reddit/Torrentfreak level hyperbole any time a perceived injustice
story is in the news and when it involves the US government, the entertainment
industry or any other entity that isn't 100% in the "information wants to be
free" boat.

~~~
darkarmani
You don't think the site could get slashdotted from everyone trying to use
this bookmarklet at the same time and PDFs getting generated from it?

At this point, I don't think it would be a stretch to see an overreaction,
even if it's just benign traffic from people checking out the free content
melt the servers.

~~~
Permit
There's a difference between 'The site may go down and 'This person I don't
know will overreact and accuse us of terrorism'. Why don't we discuss the
reality of the situation rather than some bizarre scenario you've concocted?

~~~
darkarmani
The site goes down because of a distributed "attack" in the wake of Aaron's
death. Coordinating a distributed denial of service attack (as characterized
in the worst possible light) is not a legal activity. Less crazy charges have
been brought for other "hacking" activities.

Accessing "hidden" URLs has been called unauthorized access; deep linking or
just linking to something like deCSS has been likened to a crime; port
scanning has been legally attacked a few times.

If these same type of people think URLs are a crime, I don't think the
scenario I described is that bizarre. Look up that news story about the guy in
a glider near a nuclear plant (he was catching a thermal from the lake) --
there was never a no fly zone, but officials actually considered shooting him
down! Instead they held him for 24 hours while his loved ones started a search
for his glider. They dropped the charges only after he agreed not to sue them!

~~~
Permit
My point isn't "It can't happen".

My point is "Why don't we discuss things as they are, not as they may or may
not be some time in the future?".

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mjn
I might be missing something, but how are the articles being liberated? I
don't see any downloadable articles at archiveteam.org at all. Is the idea
that they're going to be made available as a torrent or in some other
downloadable form at a later date?

------
mindslight
I feel kind of hollowish about this - I'd wondered at the time why Aaron chose
such a direct method that was sure to piss off some people and get him burnt
in some way. But everybody's got their own methods and goals, and he succeeded
at the social goal of rallying people to his cause (something a purely
technical solution has a very hard time doing). But now seeing an
implementation of a tool that would liberate the same articles, a bit slower,
but without him having to pay the ultimate price? Sigh.

------
officemonkey
I think it's entirely appropriate for those of us who have just learned of
JSTOR to go visit it and check out the site. It's interesting because they
allow you to download a single article for free.

Once I download the public domain article from 1886, I suppose I could do
whatever I wanted with it.

~~~
aw3c2
Not necessarily. The old article ITSELF is public domain, the work, so to
speak. The file you downloaded might have a new copyright because someone
worked really hard to create it. Check the license and everything before
jumping to conclusions.

~~~
jlgreco
Effort required to create something does not mean that something is
necessarily copyrighted if there was no _creative_ process involved. This is
why databases are not copyright-able in the US.

Is scanning old journals a creative process? Maybe there is some case law that
says so, but until I see that, I am inclined to say no, and everything that I
can find agrees.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right#United_States>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#Reprod...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#Reproductions_of_public_domain_works)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp).

------
ddrt
So all it takes is a famous person killing themselves over prosecution and an
insanely massive outcry from the internet. Seems easy enough. /s

~~~
jacquesm
You are misreading the title. The jstor liberator refers to a bit of
javascript, and the documents are freed up one-by-one as people run the
script, apparently limited to once per browser.

So it's not as if JSTOR suddenly saw the light of day and opened up their
archive for download.

------
3327
the beauty is its only the beginning.

------
3327
its a hack

