As far as I can tell, you have that almost completely backwards. The various submission guidelines on JSTOR’s website indicate the author is not compensated and gives up all rights to republish (essentially
gives up the copyright).
When my father was actively publishing academic material, he received $50 to $200 in total compensation, was expected to give up the copyright, and often had to PAY the publisher if he made copies. Has that changed?
With JSTOR, what can an author expect for compensation?
So you’re saying Dan Purcell is a liar. Do you have something to back that claim? A reference to MIT’s access policy at the time Aaron Swartz accessed JSTOR, perhaps?
I’ve personally used JSTOR - you have to have an account and log in. You can sometimes use a “guest” account, but obviously that implies you are given permission to do so.
Swartz had a JSTOR account because he was a research fellow.
But the tricky bit is that he was a research fellow for Harvard, not for MIT. But because JSTOR is an online database accessible at many different schools, Swartz was able to travel to MIT - which he had zero affiliation with - and use their computers to log into the JSTOR account that Harvard University had authorized him to use, presumably under their own specific terms of use which required him to access the database only from the Harvard campus. Strictly speaking, Swartz was not supposed to be accessing that database from that location.
A simple analogy might be if we give a person a key to allow access to our house as a guest, except it turns out the key also fits the lock of a different building. If they go use that key on the other building without the owner’s permission, they are in effect trespassing - even though the fact that they possess a “legitimate” key would ordinarily render them a “legitimate user” for that particular lock under normal circumstances. They are only a guest at our house - not anyone else’s.
I’ve also used JSTOR from university libraries and it didn’t require any logging in, only that I agree to their terms of use, because it was going through the university network. So that access would be provided to anyone on that network, and yes, that would include anyone off the street who asked to use the library computers.
There may be terms to that too, but all in all, it doesn’t seem like being a Harvard fellow is actually relevant here.
Edit: for those interested, here are the terms JSTOR currently requires. They allow walk in users if they are physically present, though an older version I found didn’t specify that.
You can certainly argue that it’s not rational to take your own life in any circumstance, and so there’s nothing for rational people to learn from it. But Tibetan monks don’t immolate themselves because of unpopular zoning ordnances, and Aaron Swartz didn’t commit suicide over a parking ticket-- they were driven to such desperation that they felt that it was the only card left to them to play. Even if you can’t empathise with the response, it’s easy to believe the desperation.
I think it’s relevant here because the issue is about scale. No one disputes that the state should prosecute potential violations of the law, and of course that’s not going to consist of hugs and candy. But it’s hard to know when tough-but-fair shades into cruel-and-vindictive; seeing how Aaron Swartz responded to the state’s treatment sheds imperfect but persuasive light on that question.
I have personally used it also. And institutionally. It can be authenticated, like most college databases, by ip recognition. So no. You are not making any sense at all.
He did not need a personal account with JSTOR as he was on a premises that had an institutional licence. He was not there in an unlicensed or illegal fashion and, to the best of my knowledge though I have only cursorily looked at their licensing as part of an institutional licensing arrangement, being as I am a college librarian, there was no ban on having a script so the lookup for you. So no breach of terms of service.
It was absurd. Your assertions are frankly absurd also.
Thank you, for saying the truth. Unfortunately, like Branch Davidian and other such like incidences, the government will in the general public’s mind be the savior and Aaron Swartz and his kind the villains. Several people, one I know personally, have tried to do the “right thing” in regards to what they’ve been told is the righteous path that the U.S. follows and found themselves on the wrong side of the Executive Branch. Many lose their lives or their loved ones, the lucky ones only lose their life style, crushed by all the damage done to their reputations and livelihoods. I would say that the general public thinks that the movie “Enemy of the State” is a typical Hollywood over-dramatization of some anti-U.S. fanatic writer and director. Those people were never in Aaron’s shoes or the shoes of the others who’ve stood up against evil.
Many U.S. citizens will criticize China for their handling of Tiananmen Square protests. The U.S. has a history filled with their own Tiananmen Squares, but unlike China if a Tank Man stood in front of a column of U.S. tanks he’d have been crushed.
No. Nonononono. No. You don’t “break” civil law by breaching contracts. You breach the contract, not the law.
Civil law lays out how those situations should be resolved, the injured party made whole, etc. They aren’t laws that you “break” in breaching a contract or commiting a tort against someone.
And if no injured party brings suit, civil law allows no reparations or punishments whatever.
Unless of course a prosecutor accuses you. Which doesn’t mean you broke any law, but still may have serious results. I agree with what you commented, but the accusation can be ruinous.
Thank you Dan Purcell. Thank you so much. The media treatment and glaring misinformation about what he did and the case in general have been so deeply frustrating for a bystander to watch, I’m sure it’s been far worse for you.
He set up a script to work around JSTOR’s rate limiting. When that got blocked he put a box in a network closet to work around the blocking. Misdemeanor-class wrongdoing that was turned into series of very warped Federal computing crime charges (wire fraud was particularly ludicrous).
While there are claims about his plans for how he was going to use the articles, he didn’t make any statements about intent. Given that he’d done data analysis on academic research in some of his prior projects, he might have been planning that. Or he might have been planning to free the public domain articles as he had done with PACER (the fact that JSTOR was charging for access to public domain content irked him among many others). There’s only speculation, though.
compensation for content comes from the author’s publisher when articles are downloaded by the user. this is what jstor seeks to ensure when works become part of their archive, is what access consensually implies, and is what swartz chose to either bypass or ignore.
“The case was brought under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1986 to enhance the government’s ability to prosecute hackers who accessed computers to steal information or to disrupt or destroy computer functionality.”
You have to torture those definitions a lot to get what he did to fit that. Even if his activities caused some outage on JSTOR servers, you cant say he did it to do that - he just tried to download the info and hit some unseen and unknown to him performance barriers. If that was a crime all of us studying programming at the uni were criminals the first time we made an stupid fork bomb by mistake. And “steal info” != “got some copyrigthed material”.
Had they went with reasonable charges, Aaron would have been found guilty of those, done whatever compensation was deemed correct, and thats all, everybody is happy, probably even him as the whole thing would be publicity for his cause.
Going for all the ridiculous stuff like this was some dark hat stealing credit cards and doing a DoS on servers for which he would be 35 years in jail and paying 1 million $, well, got us to were we are now.
