321–324 of 324 posts
You can't have it both ways. If people want to make money from research itself, then intellectual property must be enforced.
Many hackers seem to hold the belief that making money from research is wrong. Or at least anybody else but themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
50k is cheap as hell. UMass Boston had 125,000 JSTOR downloads last year. Let's assume we pay $50k (close enough), that's 40 cents an article. This is cheap as hell compared to other databases that charge more than that for a single search!
It's further harming the possibilities of being an independent scholar or even reading academic literature outside academia, though, which I think is a significant detriment to academia. I'm not as worried about the $50k a university library has to pay, but if you're an independent scholar for even one year, it becomes clear how harmful to the research community JSTOR is. Journals that used to sell archive access to…
And giving it away for free harms the possibilities of being an independent scholar as well. Do you seriously not understand that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems contrary to Demand Progress's statement: “It’s even more strange because the alleged victim has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they’ve suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute,” Segal added.
I got the impression Demand Progress was referring in that sentence to MIT as the "alleged victim", which seems slightly disingenuous to me. It also seems plausible that MIT would behave in the manner described. However I have not yet seen a statement from MIT that would corroborate this, either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So a Mercedes should cost 1/10th in Zimbabwe of what it does in the West, if people make 1/10th there?
I was rebutting a factual claim ("Most public libraries have relationships with JSTOR that allow members to access the articles online"), not a normative one. An analogous factual claim might be that most Zimbabweans drive Mercedes. Even without having access to Mercedes's sales figures by nation, that ought to appear unlikely to you?
My point was: your argument seems to be based on refuting the argument that the JSTOR subscription is not expensive for the average library because it is only about one yearly salary of the average rank-and-file employee, by saying that that only holds for the libraries in the US (maybe some parts of Europe, but let's say the US for the sake of this argument), and that in many other countries salaries are lower and therefor the relative cost of a JSTOR subscription higher.
So, my (perhaps naive) interpretation of this is that your ulterior argument is that JSTOR is too expensive for many libraries outside of the US, and that they therefore don't have access to its contents.
I further deduce from that, from the context in which you bring it up, is that you don't find it a problem that people take the content from JSTOR and redistribute it to people who don't have easy access to libraries who do have a subscription. Now I'll grant that this is a fairly big leap to make, and maybe you're not holding that position; but within the given context (of people arguing pro and con the actions of the Reddit guy what's-his-name), I think it's not unreasonable of me to assume so, either.
So, to close the circle, my 'question' was (but of course it is a 'question' that is, in the end, a way of stating my position in the discussion...) if it is reasonable to hold that when something is too expensive for people, it is OK to circumvent the rights holders' restrictions on the use of something. (I'm deliberately being vague on issues like 'moral ought' vs 'legal ought', if JSTOR really has a common-law variation of a database right on their collection, jurisdiction etc. - I don't really think they're important for the question at hand).