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Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

harpers.org

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Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#111

Post by jlgreco »

MichaelSalib wrote: post #109
jlgreco wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A university officially providing a pirated archive of JSTOR would be opening itself up to legal liability itself worth more than 50k. Add to that the cost of maintaining a digital archive comparable to JSTOR, the cost of training, and the cost of keeping it up to date, and you have to be absolutely insane or intellectually dishonest if you claim even a struggling school with limited resources would go with that. > I…

As I wrote earlier, I don't think universities would ever provide a pirated archive. They wouldn't need to. Grad students talk. They pass around USB drives. And pretty soon, everyone has the archive on their laptop.

Such a system would never replace a subscription to JSTOR. You have massive tunnel vision if you honestly think it could.

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#112

Post by kragen »

fatbird wrote: post #63
Natsu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which statements, specifically, do you see as being unrealistic? Edit: I'd like to know what the downvoter is thinking, too, but I wonder if I'll get any answers.

Greatest prodigy of his generation is one such example of hyperbole.

Do you have any other candidates in mind for that title? The inventor of the Web called Aaron his mentor.

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#113

Post by monochromatic »

moxie wrote: post #54
Vivtek wrote: post #6

I agree with the sentiment here, but some of the specific claims are certainly wince-worthy. College prank? Greatest prodigy of his generation? Little to no commercial value? All those claims are a lot more complicated than that! Not to mention it makes it sound like Ortiz was cooking this all up behind closed doors and everyone else was shocked! shocked! to realize how the "prosecutorial misconduct" had gotten out o…

I think this is the hardest part. Ortiz is obviously disgusting, but she's not really different than anyone else in her position. These kinds of tactics are employed every day. So what do we do? I support the demonization of Ortiz purely on the level of revenge. In a world where we typically have no agency, it's satisfying to make someone like her uncomfortable. But on another level, it's frustrating that it's imposs…

Why is Ortiz "obviously disgusting"?

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#114

Post by fatbird »

clicks wrote: post #78
fatbird wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greatest prodigy of his generation is one such example of hyperbole.

He authored the RSS spec at age 14. He may not be the greatest prodigy, but as far as I can tell he's one of the greater prodigies. I do not think it is a hyperbole at all to label him the 'greatest prodigy' of our generation. He made great contributions in the effort of making information free, with his work on the commons and all. That is a profoundly big endeavor that pushes humanity forword, do not be so quick to…

I think the broader point is that lionizing Swartz and demonizing Ortiz turns the whole episode into a morality play in which we want to see Ortiz lynched because Jesus was crucified. The issues raised are systemic issues and require systemic solutions, in the long term. Focusing on the individuals involved obscures that. If all that happens is that Ortiz is scapegoated by the DOJ, then we'll have failed to capitalize on the moment to enact real, useful change.

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#115

Post by MichaelSalib »

smsm42 wrote: post #101
MichaelSalib wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make sense. Imagine a world where Swartz managed to destroy JSTOR. A professor asks his grad students to read an article. They can either dig it out of the archival stacks and read it there or wait for interlibrary loan or...use a torrented copy or illegal DVD they bought on the street at their last academic conference. There is no way to track which one they did. No one will ever know. And no one will c…

Swartz never intended to destroy JSTOR. He wanted to provide access to the articles (many of them, I'm sure, public financed and should be publicly accessible anyway) to people that do not have 50K/year to pay to JSTOR. That would by no way destroy JSTOR, but if the access to the storage could be provided much cheaper - in theory, if it would be possible to do all the functions of JSTOR without JSTOR - I see no reaso…

With respect, the fact that he wrote the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto suggests that he did want to destroy JSTOR as a going concern. Now, maybe he didn't think releasing their archive would be enough, but he was clearly gunning for them.

He wanted to provide access to the articles to people that do not have 50K/year to pay to JSTOR. That would by no way destroy JSTOR

JSTOR prorates its fees so that poor institutions pay much less than rich institutions. And all of Africa gets JSTOR for free. Now, even individuals can get capped free articles from JSTOR.

If the JSTOR archive was released to the world, why would journal owners continue licensing their content to JSTOR?

Finally, do you understand that most of what JSTOR charges pays for either licensing the journal content (JSTOR doesn't own copyright for the journals it includes) or for scanning/digitizing new content? The costs that JSTOR charges pay for a hell of a lot more than a few web sites pushing PDFs to clients.

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#116

Post by monochromatic »

DanBC wrote: post #26

> Heymann responded by saying “Fine, we’ll lock him up.” Cruel and barbaric. This comment is horrifying. Many people commit suicide in prison. Being under suicide watch reduces, but does not eliminate, the risk. (I know someone who was under "level 2 observation" (a member of staff within arms reach at all times) in a MH hospital. They managed to self harm so severely they needed to be transported to a general hospit…

On the other hand, if saying "my client is suicidal" got defense attorneys anywhere, the only result would be that suddenly every criminal is suicidal.

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#117

Post by jstevens85 »

clicks wrote: post #78
fatbird wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greatest prodigy of his generation is one such example of hyperbole.

He authored the RSS spec at age 14. He may not be the greatest prodigy, but as far as I can tell he's one of the greater prodigies. I do not think it is a hyperbole at all to label him the 'greatest prodigy' of our generation. He made great contributions in the effort of making information free, with his work on the commons and all. That is a profoundly big endeavor that pushes humanity forword, do not be so quick to…

Authoring the RSS spec may be an exaggeration. A history of RSS can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

Basically, it seems like the original RSS spec (RSS 0.9) was authored by two guys at Netscape, and released in March 1999, followed by RSS 0.91 in July 1999.

At this point, it looks like Netscape lost interest in RSS, and the project was forked into two competing versions, one lead by Dave Winer, and the other by the RSS-DEV Working Group. Dave Winer published the specs RSS 0.91 (different to Netscape's), 0.92, 0.93, .94 and then 2.0 between 2000-2002.

In August 2000, a competing fork was started by Rael Dornfest, who posted a draft of RSS 1.0, which appears to have been written by himself. He asked for interested parties to join a working group, of which Aaron became a member. This group became known as the RSS-DEV Working Group, and 1.0 was published in December 2000.

It's hard to say how much involvement Aaron had in this working group (I haven't read through the archives), but RSS had certainly existed for some time before Aaron became involved.

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#118

Post by ucee054 »

MichaelSalib wrote: post #100
ucee054 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You NEED access to journals and conferences if you are silly enough to become a research student (like I did) or even sillier and become a professional researcher. Also, there is no way on earth you can pay for it on a researcher's salary or stipend. Hence, the Universities and Laboratories are BLACKMAILED into paying for it on the researchers' behalf. (So the 50K/year thing applies to MIT, Harvard and a couple of ot…

You NEED access to journals and conferences And you have them, in dead tree form at every big university. Universities functioned long before JSTOR. BLACKMAILED If you think this is blackmail, you don't know much. if you want to pretend that the 50K multiplies by the potential readership as "loss due to copyright theft" I don't believe that at all. My point was just that the archive has serious commercial value. If y…

Swartz's actions would have been an "attack" on a research archive, which the article classifies as having "little" commercial value (and Swartz wasn't profiting, it was civil disobedience).

The Reuters news for yesterday lists the LIBOR scandal, which was an "attack" on financial data. The fine alone, for UBS alone, was $1.5Billion. Now that's what I call "serious commercial value". JSTOR, not so much.

Do you want to keep arguing the point or do you feel silly enough already?

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#119

Post by MichaelSalib »

pekk wrote: post #87
MichaelSalib wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that vengeance can be satisfying, but it means sending a message. And the message that US attorneys are going to hear is "don't fuck with young affluent white hackers with powerful friends". I never met Swartz, but I'd be surprised if he'd have wanted his legacy to be people that look like him getting a pass while everyone else suffers the same as before.

There is no reason to suppose that this will be taken as a reason not to prosecute white people . The specific act and its context are clearly more important.

In international relations, there's a whole literature devoted to signalling: looking at how states send signals to other states. There's a huge amount of evidence showing that the signals received are very often different from the ones transmitted.

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#120

Post by GHFigs »

ucee054 wrote: post #99
raldi wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but I don't see how that's relevant to my point.. which was merely that it's possible for a person to commit a crime without harming anyone or doing damage.

Were you making that point in the abstract, or were you, I don't know, in a thread of comments on an article about Aaron Swartz?

He was responding to a comment making the argument that something cannot be a crime if no damage is done and no one is hurt. He even quoted the as much of the comment he was replying to.

Please, please, please, pay attention to context before accusing someone of ignoring context. It makes it very difficult for people to have nuanced debates about complex events if nobody is allowed to isolate a part of the problem independent of others.

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