Aaron Swartz died three years ago today • Hacker News Board

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#211

Post by ionised » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 11:43 AM UTC

an_account wrote: post #51

wolfgke wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. Aaron himself said "There is no justice in following unjust laws." > https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... I even go further and say that you can't be good and lawful at the same time - at least not in any currently existing system of laws.

Is the right course of action to break "unjust" laws, or to just fight to change them? This is an opinion, but I argue that every person has a different definition of what is "just", and if everyone followed their definition of "just", than our legal system would break down. Society functions on a set of laws, but those laws can change for the better.

Fighting to change the system from within that system is much, much less effective than massie civil disobedience of that system. In fact it seems completely ineffectual to me most of the time.

I'm on the 'break unjust laws' side of the argument, as have been many of the greatest civil rights figures in history. Break the unjust laws and convince as many people as you can to break them as well.

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#212

Post by foldr » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 2:01 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #198

raldi wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some quotes from the official MIT report: http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pd... Typically, when an excessive use case is reported that is determined to originate from within MIT’s network, the Libraries report this to either the MIT Information Services and Technology (IS&T) network security team or MIT’s “Stopit” group, which deals with inappropriate behavior that occurs electronically. The…

Nobody was harmed, no property damaged. Sounds like a "hack" to me. Certainly cheaper than getting a car off of a building.

Sure people were harmed. JSTOR going down is a big deal. It's relied on by academics all over the world.

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#213

Post by foldr » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 2:03 PM UTC

jsprogrammer wrote: post #199

raldi wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "them" in the sentence you quoted refers to "the original public records". The locks you refer to were around the new , value-added work: the digitized, processed, cataloged version of the papers they had made by adding value to the original public-domain documents. The locks were not applied to the original documents. It's like the difference between storing a touched-up version you made of an Apollo 11 photo in…

Maybe you are talking about a different lock box? JSTOR doesn't claim that its documents are public-domain: Our licenses from publishers are non-exclusive, meaning that the publishers are free to license their content to others to digitize or make it available in any way they might wish. [0] Not only were many of the papers in JSTOR funded by the public, but JSTOR itself claims to be funded through by the public thro…

JSTOR cannot magically put documents in the public domain. It needs the permission of the original publishers. JSTOR is responsible for scanning a whole ton of old journals which would otherwise only be available as physical copies in libraries. Nothing JSTOR has ever done has ever made anything less accessible than it was before.