War on Knowledge

[Pure]

Ever looked for a paper online and found it cost$30? For old papers, what would you pay?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/21/aaron_swartz_prosecution_protest/

19,000 papers leaked to protest 'war against knowledge'



Prosecution of Reddit founder cited

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco

Posted in Law, 21st July 2011 20:26 GMT

A critic of academic publishers has uploaded 19,000 scientific papers to the internet to protest the prosecution of a prominent programmer and activist accused of hacking into a college computer system and downloading almost 5 million scholarly documents[...]

The 18,592 documents made available Wednesday through Bittorrent were pulled from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, [...], the protester said. Even though the vast majority of the documents are hundreds of years old, the London-based Royal Society charges from $8 to $19 for each one....

"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," [said Gregory Maxwell,[...]

Maxwell's action comes three days after federal prosecutors charged Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz with computer intrusion, fraud, and data theft. They allege he broke into a locked computer-wiring closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloaded more than 4.8 million scholarly articles from JSTOR, an online archive of more than 1,000 academic journals.

 

[sr71plt]

If you are an author, you would uphold the principles of copyright privilege rather than the concept of free access to everything, wouldn't you? This was the Authors' Hangout the last time I checked.

 

[Pure]

if you were a reader, you would have noticed that in the second case, Swartz was not even charged with copyright violation.

from the story:

Academics and copyright critics immediately criticized the charges [vs Swartz] as excessive, likening them to trying to put someone in jail for checking out too many library books. They argue that many of the documents in JSTOR's collection are probably kept behind its paywall against the authors' will and that there are no valid copyright claims restricting their distribution.

Indeed, court documents charging Swartz contain no claims of copyright violations. Instead, they cite Swartz for intrusion of MIT's computer network and for impairing JSTOR's systems by using an automated script that systematically scraped its archive.

 

[estragon]

Agreeing with sr71plt for once in a way, I paraphrase George Bernard Shaw: Agitate as a Communist for the abolition of all private property, if you will, but while private property remains, copyright is the only way an author can get paid for his or her work.

Now in this case, at least some, and perhaps many, of the authors' works are no longer subject to copyright by dint of the passage of time. So the issue is whether the soi-disant proprietors, whose sites were hacked, have any right to the works. After all, the reason stated in Article II, Section 8 of the United States Constitution for Congress' power to enact copyright legislation is: "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;".

So, first, the Authors and Inventors are to be encouraged. Second, their exclusive rights in and to their Writings and Discoveries are limited in time. In both the first and the second case, this is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.

So it is the authors and inventors, and their permissible assignees and successors, to whom the exclusive rights are granted, and even those are limited. But while those rights subsist, they are still rights.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Interesting! No copyright and no theft of paper/ink. The crime I suppose is breaking/entering.

 

[Goldie Munro]

Ever looked for a paper online and found it cost$30? For old papers, what would you pay?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/21/aaron_swartz_prosecution_protest/

19,000 papers leaked to protest 'war against knowledge'



Prosecution of Reddit founder cited

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco

Posted in Law, 21st July 2011 20:26 GMT

A critic of academic publishers has uploaded 19,000 scientific papers to the internet to protest the prosecution of a prominent programmer and activist accused of hacking into a college computer system and downloading almost 5 million scholarly documents[...]

The 18,592 documents made available Wednesday through Bittorrent were pulled from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, [...], the protester said. Even though the vast majority of the documents are hundreds of years old, the London-based Royal Society charges from $8 to $19 for each one....

"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," [said Gregory Maxwell,[...]

Maxwell's action comes three days after federal prosecutors charged Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz with computer intrusion, fraud, and data theft. They allege he broke into a locked computer-wiring closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloaded more than 4.8 million scholarly articles from JSTOR, an online archive of more than 1,000 academic journals.

$30 for one paper seems excessive. Problem with the internet is that it has made knowledge free. Or has it? There is a dichotomy here. Should all information be available free for everyone? Would authors of scientific, or other academic papers, expect to be paid for them if they weren't being published on the internet? I really don't know the answer to this - it is a problem that all media industries are having to tackle.

Knowledge is power. Who has that power now?

 

[estragon]

Once again technology has totally outstripped legal constructs. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is so last-millennium. And yes, the crime is hacking someone's computer database, not copyright infringement. Or at least not principally copyright infringement.

 

[sr71plt]

Sorry, but you've gotta be a pretty dim bulb and/or not relate to authors at all to post an anti-intellectual property rights post to a forum named Authors' Hangout.

Although I suspect that many posting here don't get the "authors" connection of the forum--or, I guess, the connection between being an author and intellectual property rights.

 

[Pure]

Royal Society

i'm not a lawyer, but the following information suggestions that the authors of papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society [see Maxwell case, above] where those papers were published 100 or more years ago, are no longer protected by copyright. i don't know if the Royal Society has a legitimate 'lock' or copyright on those old papers, or just de facto control access to them.

wiki

Donaldson v Beckett (1774). Donaldson v Beckett eventually established that copyright was a "creature of statute", and that the rights and responsibilities in copyright were determined by legislation.[12] The Lords clearly voted against perpetual copyright[13] and by confirming that the copyright term—that is the length of time a work is in copyright—did expire according to statute the Lords also confirmed that a large number of works and books first published in Britain were in the public domain, either because the copyright term granted by statute had expired, or because they were first published before the Statute of Anne was enacted in 1709. This opened the market for cheap reprints of works from Shakespeare, John Milton and Geoffrey Chaucer, works now considered classics. The expansion of the public domain in books broke the dominance of the London booksellers and allowed for competition,

===
wiki

The [UK] Copyright Act 1956
Main article: Copyright Act 1956

The Copyright Act 1956 was passed in order to bring UK copyright law in line with international copyright law and technological developments.[17] The main changes which it introduced were the lengthening and simplifying of the copyright term, creating a uniform period of protection of the lifetime of the author plus fifty years thereafter.

 

[Pure]

you've gotta be a pretty dim bulb [in sr71's words] not to see that the issues raised in the two cases cited are not simple copyright cases involving living authors.

 

[sr71plt]

you've gotta be a pretty dim bulb [in sr71's words] not to see that the issues raised in the two cases cited are not simple copyright cases involving living authors.

It doesn't matter. The authors have assigned their rights--which is their privilege to do. Your head says it all about your position on this--it's a war you're fighting to have access to all knowledge (and apparently every author's version of that). I take it you're arrogant enough to claim personal privilege on deciding who can exercise intellectual property rights and who can't--and that you'll make these determinations on the basis of your own personal convenience.

Again, it takes balls and muddleheadedness to post an anti-intellectual property rights post to an Authors' Hangout.

 

[Pure]

pure: the issues raised in the two cases cited are not simple copyright cases involving living authors.

sr71 It doesn't matter. The authors have assigned their rights-
------------

any evidence for this assertion, esp. as applied to authors of the Royal Society papers, 100 or more years back?

further coverage in the news suggests that Maxwell's 'case' is stronger than Swartz's:

http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_new...or-the-good-of-science?chromedomain=cosmiclog

More knowledge 'stolen' for the good of science

By Nidhi Subbaraman

After an Internet activist was indicted on Tuesday for bulk-downloading academic papers, an apparent ally has made 18,592 other papers from the same archive available for anyone to download. Open access rebel Aaron Swartz allegedly used guest networks at MIT for a mass download of 4.8 million documents from JSTOR, an academic database.

Seemingly in solidarity with Swartz, someone called Gregory Maxwell has uploaded to 33 GB of journal articles, also obtained from JSTOR, to peer-to-peer file-sharing hub Pirate Bay, GigaOm is reporting. Maxwell obtained the articles many years ago, "through rather boring and lawful means," he writes in his Pirate Bay statement. It seems Maxwell's sharing is potentially boring and lawful too: the articles were published before 1923 and are no longer bound by copyright. [...]

[NS adds:] (This may or may not be the case for Swartz's trove — nobody knows what was in it, or if it was still bound by copyright law.)

 

[sr71plt]

any evidence for this assertion, esp. as applied to authors of the Royal Society papers, 100 or more years back?

Not that anyone would have to provide to you. And, if asked, they probably would tell you to butt out until the case was resolved. Since you know squat about what's really involved too. Just Chicken Littling here, pushing an agenda that is anti-author.

 

[estragon]

Trying it from another angle, there are two issues here, so let's not conflate them.

First, to some extent it is an issue of the authors' rights (or their permissible assignees' and successors' rights; really the same thing), to the extent protected by copyright. In such case, at least in the United States, there are civil and criminal penalties for stealing work so protected.

Second, to the extent any of the work never was, or is no longer, so protected, it's a question of hacking into the database. I may have a library full of works that never were, or are no longer, protected by copyright. No one has a right to break into my library and take those works away, copyright or no copyright. Breaking and entering, as JEJ said; and breaking and entering need not only be physical, as smashing the doorlock with a crowbar. Picking an electronic lock is the same thing.

Finally, I'll repeat what I said before, on the subject of creative works being common property. To paraphrase G. B. Shaw, agitate as a Communist for the abolition of all private property, if you will. But so long as private property exists, copyright is the only way in which an author can be paid for his or her work.

 

[sr71plt]

Yes, I think this is a simple theft issue myself. But that's not how the thread was presented, and I'll bet that pure gave no thought at all to an author's interests (on the Authors' Hangout) when he chose to post the thread here.

I get disgusted here when folks both complain on the AH about people ripping off their stories and don't give a peep when posters like pure violate copyright by what they post to the forum. If you don't want to be ripped off, you are being two-faced to tolerate it happening to others around you.

 

[Pure]

never troubled by consistency, sr71 began by repeatedly raising the issue of 'intellectual property rights," for example:

sr71 Sorry, but you've gotta be a pretty dim bulb and/or not relate to authors at all to post an anti-intellectual property rights post to a forum named Authors' Hangout.
========

now he says,

sr 71 Yes, I think this is a simple theft issue myself.

---
this new position, like the first, is untroubled by the facts, to wit
(taking Maxwell's statement in the second article [MSNBC] as possibly true):

[subbaraman] Maxwell obtained the articles many years ago, "through rather boring and lawful means," he writes in his Pirate Bay statement. It seems Maxwell's sharing is potentially boring and lawful too: the articles were published before 1923 and are no longer bound by copyright. [...]
----
===

sr I get disgusted here when folks... etc.
----

delightful bloviations on off-topic matters! their author, still crabby, continues to say nothing of substance on the issues at hand.

 

[sr71plt]

never troubled by consistency, sr71 began by repeatedly raising the issue of 'intellectual property rights," for example:

sr71 Sorry, but you've gotta be a pretty dim bulb and/or not relate to authors at all to post an anti-intellectual property rights post to a forum named Authors' Hangout.
========

now he says,

sr 71 Yes, I think this is a simple theft issue myself.

---
this new position, like the first, is untroubled by the facts, to wit
(taking Maxwell's statement in the second article [MSNBC] as possibly true):

[subbaraman] Maxwell obtained the articles many years ago, "through rather boring and lawful means," he writes in his Pirate Bay statement. It seems Maxwell's sharing is potentially boring and lawful too: the articles were published before 1923 and are no longer bound by copyright. [...]
----
===

sr I get disgusted here when folks... etc.
----

delightful bloviations on off-topic matters! their author, still crabby, continues to say nothing of substance on the issues at hand.

I was responding to your interpretation of the issue. You were the one who introduced this as an intellectual property issue. Or are you trying to kid us that a "war on knowledge" would justify simple theft?

Guess you get mealymouthed when you get cornered.

I'm quite ready to accept that theft is OK with you as long as you personally get to have whatever you want for free.

 

[Pure]

further information about Maxwell case:

Chronicle of Higher Education article:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcam...cle/wiredcampus+(The+Chronicle:+Wired+Campus)

it is far from clear whether Maxwell broke into, or hacked into, any computer or database.

 

[sr71plt]

Chronicle of Higher Education article:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcam...cle/wiredcampus+(The+Chronicle:+Wired+Campus)

it is far from clear whether Maxwell broke into, or hacked into, any computer or database.

But you couldn't wait for anything to be clear, could you?

 

[ishtat]

Ever looked for a paper online and found it cost$30? For old papers, what would you pay?

I am quoting Pure but questioning SR71plt. It seems to me that Pure's original question was pretty innocuous and does not promote any anti-author agenda.

Such an agenda is only apparent in so far as SR71plt has suggested it exists. I see no evidence for it, either in Pure's original, or in his subsequent comments.

In the Royal Society case, it seems to me that the framing of criminal charges will be very difficult and there is no easy civil claim, either for copyright infringement, or anything else. Just because the RS charged for copying and access doesn't necessarily mean of itself that they held any rights over the content of the documents.

The US case seems likely to stand or fall on an alleged statutory breach. It is perhaps rash to form a view without knowing rather more of the facts.

 

[sr71plt]

I am quoting Pure but questioning SR71plt. It seems to me that Pure's original question was pretty innocuous and does not promote any anti-author agenda.

Such an agenda is only apparent in so far as SR71plt has suggested it exists. I see no evidence for it, either in Pure's original, or in his subsequent comments.

In the Royal Society case, it seems to me that the framing of criminal charges will be very difficult and there is no easy civil claim, either for copyright infringement, or anything else. Just because the RS charged for copying and access doesn't necessarily mean of itself that they held any rights over the content of the documents.

The US case seems likely to stand or fall on an alleged statutory breach. It is perhaps rash to form a view without knowing rather more of the facts.

Oh, you missed the "war on knowledge" slug pure gave it? Pure's agenda here--trumpeted by the slug pure gave the thread--was one of anything written should be public domain from the get go--and, in this case, hacking computers to get at it is justified because it's just a war for unfettered access to everything.

But, let's just drop it--it's clear that there are few real authors here anyway--and to the extent they are, they can't connect to their self-interest. Pity, since it's supposed to the Authors' Hangout.

 

[Pure]

the thread title "war on knowledge" was simply a rendering from the title of the original article, 19,000 papers leaked to protest 'war against knowledge'. the phrase 'war against knowledge' is Maxwell's term for the Royal Society's lock on historic papers, pre 1923, limiting and charging for access.

===
Kaspersky news re Maxwell case.

July 22, 2011, 4:57PM
New Leak of Documents Is Protest Over Harvard Fellow's Arrest

While washing its hands of the Maxwell case, Ithaka is also trying to keep a low profile as the U.S. Attorney's Office pursues its case against Swartz. McGregor [of Ithaka, which operates JSTOR] said in an email that Ithaka has retrieved the documents downloaded by Swartz and isn't interested in pursuing a case against Swartz for taking them.

http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/new-leak-documents-protest-over-harvard-fellows-arrest-072211
================

discussion of swartz case at scholarly kitchen. (independent blog for authors in the Society for Scholarly Publishing). the issue of 'theft'.

Jul 20, 2011
A Bizarre Approach to Accessing JSTOR Earns Federal Charges for an Internet Activist

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/...rns-federal-charges-for-an-internet-activist/
================

Kaspersky Lab security service news

July 19, 2011, 4:39PM
Indictment Names Reddit Luminary In Theft of Data from MIT


http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/indictment-names-reddit-co-founder-theft-data-mit-071911

 

[ishtat]

Oh, you missed the "war on knowledge" slug pure gave it? Pure's agenda here--trumpeted by the slug pure gave the thread--was one of anything written should be public domain from the get go--and, in this case, hacking computers to get at it is justified because it's just a war for unfettered access to everything.

But, let's just drop it--it's clear that there are few real authors here anyway--and to the extent they are, they can't connect to their self-interest. Pity, since it's supposed to the Authors' Hangout.

No, SP71plt, I didn't miss any 'slug' or 'agenda' because both are a product of your imagination.

Your contention intrigued me though, because the erection of an "Aunt Sally" argument from the misinterpretation of a thread starter for the sole purpose of attacking it, is a technique much beloved by Amicus. But a surprise from you.

 

[sr71plt]

No, SP71plt, I didn't miss any 'slug' or 'agenda' because both are a product of your imagination.

Your contention intrigued me though, because the erection of an "Aunt Sally" argument from the misinterpretation of a thread starter for the sole purpose of attacking it, is a technique much beloved by Amicus. But a surprise from you.

I, of course, don't think it's a misinterpreation at all. "War on Knowledge" is a key phrase of the "Jerk it all away from the intellectual property owners and let me at it for free" movement, this story is an example of that, and the post didn't just fall on the forum by itself. Someone purposely posted it here and picked that head slug.

Being just a bit too cute about this.

Again, would like to see a bit more buying into the actual mentality of being an author on the Author's Hangout.

 

[PennLady]

I'm with SR71. I'll take whatever books, news, etc., I can legally get for free. When they start requiring payment, I shall decide the best use of my money. I do not give all of my stuff away for free, nor do I expect others to.

I worked at a publishing company for fifteen years and was there as we began putting our publications on the web. Our owner was very suspicious, and with reason -- he didn't want to undercut himself. From the beginning, everything was secure and required a username and password, and in fact, the price was the same. The difference was that we created databases of related documents -- press releases, scientific papers, industry reports -- to give them a value-added service.

It costs money to put those publications together, whether it's online or in print. Our reporters worked hard, got their information, and put it together for those who wanted and needed it (and our stuff is read at high government and industry levels). Then there is the staff that formats and uploads and maintains the database.

We should give all this away for free? The owner was a great guy, but he didn't have bottomless pockets.

There are various things wrong with this situation, and breaking any copyrights is right up there with breaking into a closet at MIT. They had no right.