Comment by hk1337
11 days ago
Agreed, to an extent, but that doesn't mean you can breach any barrier someone has in place preventing access, take it, and make it publicly available.
11 days ago
Agreed, to an extent, but that doesn't mean you can breach any barrier someone has in place preventing access, take it, and make it publicly available.
The information Swartz was downloading was scientific papers that we, the public, have already paid for with our tax dollars. The crime here is that the government allows JSTOR and other private companies to still hold those papers behind paywalls instead of releasing them into the public domain as they should have been.
JSTOR didn't own the copyright to any of the material, so could only serve it under the license agreements it had. Nevertheless they were able to arrange for their license to allow over 10000 schools, libraries, and other institutions to provide free access to walk-in users.
A large number of the material on JSTOR wouldn't be online at all if not for JSTOR, because they have put a lot of time and money into digitizing back issues of journals that the publishers probably would have never gotten around to.
> they were able to arrange for their license to allow over 10000 schools, libraries, and other institutions to provide free access to walk-in users.
Sure, but that still only covers a miniscule fraction of US taxpayers. Plus, you have to walk in to the school, library, or other institution, instead of just being able to use your web browser at home.
> A large number of the material on JSTOR wouldn't be online at all if not for JSTOR, because they have put a lot of time and money into digitizing back issues of journals that the publishers probably would have never gotten around to.
This is a genuine value add, but it could have been paid for by the government directly without then having the material behind a paywall.
Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access.
The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge.
Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding. That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition.
>The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge.
I think a better analogy for this situation is: The public donates food, then the recipient, after being fed, sells access to (infinite cheaply replicable copies of) said food for a profit. The public in this case just wants to have said food.
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> Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access.
So when your tax dollars pay for a scientist to do research, you don't think the papers that document that research should be public property? If scientists want to keep their research private, they should find private funding.
Note that, as in my previous post, I said "should". If you mean there isn't explicit language to that effect in the grants, see further comments below.
> The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge.
Invalid comparison. The scientific papers in question are not the personal property of the scientists.
> Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding.
IMO this should be the case, and it's an outrage that it's not, since it should be an obvious requirement for any research that our tax dollars pay for.
> That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition.
Maybe that wasn't written into the grants explicitly, but that just means our government is (once again) failing to act in our best interests.
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Surely it depends on the specific information in question?