Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

blog.curiousquail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–427 of 427 posts

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#421

Post by DANmode »

foldr wrote: post #420
DANmode wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simply don’t see JSTOR outlasting (as an organization, or a technology/archive) individual contributors and torrent trackers. Solution which does not require millions of people =]

At present I don’t see individual contributors making any significant contribution towards scanning old academic journals. Why would this change in the future? There was at least a decade where the technology to enable this existed, and where most older issues of most journals were not available online, and yet the army of volunteer scanners failed to materialize. Now that there is already a non-profit doing this arc…

Probably just going to keep reading the news ones,

and if I want to synthesize information from old ones, I’ll query a robot.

This is still research we’re talking about, right? Not a first-edition of famous literature?

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#422

Post by foldr »

DANmode wrote: post #421
foldr wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At present I don’t see individual contributors making any significant contribution towards scanning old academic journals. Why would this change in the future? There was at least a decade where the technology to enable this existed, and where most older issues of most journals were not available online, and yet the army of volunteer scanners failed to materialize. Now that there is already a non-profit doing this arc…

Probably just going to keep reading the news ones, and if I want to synthesize information from old ones, I’ll query a robot. This is still research we’re talking about, right? Not a first-edition of famous literature?

'Research' includes subjects such as history, where old documents are important for obvious reasons. Besides such cases, I gave a concrete example above of a paper from the 90s that's available online because JSTOR scanned it. Hardly ancient history.

>I’ll query a robot.

Which has read all the old papers that JSTOR has scanned. That's why it's able to synthesise them for you!

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#423

Post by DANmode »

foldr wrote: post #422
DANmode wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably just going to keep reading the news ones, and if I want to synthesize information from old ones, I’ll query a robot. This is still research we’re talking about, right? Not a first-edition of famous literature?

'Research' includes subjects such as history, where old documents are important for obvious reasons. Besides such cases, I gave a concrete example above of a paper from the 90s that's available online because JSTOR scanned it. Hardly ancient history. >I’ll query a robot. Which has read all the old papers that JSTOR has scanned. That's why it's able to synthesise them for you!

> I gave a concrete example above of a paper from the 90s that's available online because JSTOR scanned it. Hardly ancient history.

For certain sciences, 36 years is two lifetimes. Like I said: we’re talking past each other due to our research needs.

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#424

Post by johnnyanmac »

arionhardison wrote: post #232
drivebyhooting wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s infuriating.

Yes, it's also solvable; the crux of the issue is that these people have made it problematic to even discuss any solutions that do not serve their personal, financial and nationalist interest. All and any fact should be up for discussion. For example, the black community; my community has a serious problem with violence that has caused increased police presence as it spilled out and impacted other communities. We can…

>All discussion of the conditions which allow situations like this to occur are shut down and labeled an ism, ist etc...

Because they actually are isms and you don't actually truly discuss the systematic issues below? Because solutions to such deep systematic issues require solutions that do not favor those in power?

Or because you think that people just want to virtue signal and feel good about themselves rather than really discuss much of anything?

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#426

Post by s1artibartfast »

silver_sun wrote: post #418
s1artibartfast wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we are better off avoiding the analogies. The public gives them cash for terms of a grant. If those dont include an open access paper, it is unreasonable to demand it after the fact. It certainly doesn't give a right to go take take their papers (or whatever they made).

There's some common-sense understanding of this situation that I'm not sure you're wilfully overlooking or oblivious to. The claim is that it's unjust to blatantly exploit a system that was intended to fund/sustain you, for profit. It's not necessarily illegal behavior since "open access" was not in the terms, but how can it possibly be morally defensible that they have managed to find a way to legally subvert/trick…

Its not subversion or a trick. It is reasonable and functioning as intended.

There was no deception or trick. It was 100% up front and what those involved expected.

There is no moral failing aside from those stealing and spreading outrage.

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#427

Post by foldr »

DANmode wrote: post #423
foldr wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Research' includes subjects such as history, where old documents are important for obvious reasons. Besides such cases, I gave a concrete example above of a paper from the 90s that's available online because JSTOR scanned it. Hardly ancient history. >I’ll query a robot. Which has read all the old papers that JSTOR has scanned. That's why it's able to synthesise them for you!

> I gave a concrete example above of a paper from the 90s that's available online because JSTOR scanned it. Hardly ancient history. For certain sciences, 36 years is two lifetimes. Like I said: we’re talking past each other due to our research needs.

We're talking past each other because you only care about your own research needs and apparently can't see any value in opening access to documents which other researchers might need. I am not a historian, but even so, it's not lost on me that a historian might want to access some old documents. Just because you think that JSTOR isn't useful to you personally (though, I can guarantee that your 'robots' have been trained on it) doesn't mean that it's not serving a useful function to the academic research community as a whole.

One can imagine the quality of research in fields where researchers can't be bothered to read anything that wasn't published in the last five minutes, and rely on other people's partial and possibly inaccurate summaries of key results. But that is another topic.

Post reply on HN