Re: <nettime> Aaron Swartz charged for downloading too many Journal articles from the Library: Please sign suport petition.

[Jon Lebkowsky <jon.lebkowsky@gmail.com>]

JSTOR isn't free: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR. A news article
says "Of the 4.8 million documents downloaded, 1.7 million should only
have been available for purchase through a sales service." However
Aaron already had free access to the database. He's being charged with
circumventing security or "breaking into" the system to get millions
of articles quickly.

MIT and JSTOR had settled their claims against Aaron and asked the
government not to prosecute, so it's an interesting question why the
prosecutors decided to indict.

See
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/07/20/activist_charged_with_hacking_mit_network_to_download_files/?page=1for
more info. Toward the end of the article:

"[Attorney Jerry] Cohen said the use of criminal charges here is the
latest in what has been a government trend to prosecute such cases,
which he described as taking 'a sledgehammer to drive a thumb tack.'

'It might be taking too big a weapon,' he said. 'It???s intended to terrorize
the person who???s indicted and others who might be thinking of the same
thing.'"
~ Jon L.


On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 3:24 AM, Nick <nettime@njw.me.uk> wrote:

>
> I've never understood how jstor can claim to limit access to journal
> articles. Aren't they publically funded? Even if not, charging huge
> fees (and in so doing stopping access from the vast majority who
> aren't affiliated with a university) for works created (one hopes)
> for the purposes of sharing knowledge, and without any payment to the
> author, seems so obviously poisonous it's shocking there isn't louder
> dissent (or maybe I just haven't had my ear to the right places).


<...>



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Jon Lebkowsky (@jonl)
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