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Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

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Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#151

Post by jmesserly »

mpyne wrote: post #142
temphn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The press will never get everything 100% accurate, but let's look on the bright side. A week ago, many lawyers (example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052339 ) were assuring us that seeing any accountability for Ortiz and Heymann would be a "fantasy", that this wasn't the way things worked, that hackers had to wise up and embrace their impotence. That wasn't the way things played out. With this (as with the mo…

> This week, at least, the lawyers' worldview was proven wrong and the hackers' worldview was proven right, in both the empirical and moral senses of the terms. Let's hope that continues. I've seen more prevaricating (and sometimes outright lying) this week from the hackers than from the lawyers so I, for one, hope that the lynch mob ceases immediately.

Oh please. Wanting someone held accountable for their negligence and overreach is not a "lynch mob".

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#152

Post by fatbird »

Natsu wrote: post #126
fatbird wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How many other 20-somethings can you name who have impacted the world for the better as much as he has?

None. But until Swartz committed suicide, I couldn't have named him either.

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#153

Post by betterunix »

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…

"Little to no commercial value?"

This is one thing is was absolutely correct: those articles had almost no chance of being sold at $20 a piece. In fact, the commercial value has little to do with the articles themselves, since JSTOR and journal publishers make the bulk of their money from subscriptions, which libraries will pay for regardless of the availability of articles by other means, and by offering search services, which Aaron was not preparing to offer. The claim that Aaron's plan would have caused any measurable harm to JSTOR or any of the publishers it contracts is dubious.

It is also worth noting that the government is not supposed to be in the business of indiscriminately protecting commercial interests. Even if we assume that sharing these articles via BitTorrent would have damaged JSTOR's business, so what? The purpose of academic publishers in our society is to make knowledge available on a widespread basis, and if BitTorrent does a better job we should have switched to BitTorrent long ago. Academic publishers are not like the RIAA or MPAA; where the music and movie businesses can claim that their profits pay for the entertainment they release, journal publishers cannot make such a claim, because the research they publish is paid for by someone else, the peer review process is voluntary, and many journals even have volunteer editors.

I agree that the characterization of Aaron's behavior as a "college prank" is unrealistic; a better characterization would have been "heroic."

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#154

Post by betterunix »

MichaelSalib wrote: post #53
Natsu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Little to no commercial value? Have you ever tried to sell a diamon, err, scholarly article?

JSTOR sells access to its archive for $50K/year. That seems pretty damn valuable. I think that if Swartz successfully released the JSTOR archive, their entire business would have withered and died. Once you can buy a DVD on the street for $3 that held the entire thing, it gets harder and harder for university libraries to justify paying $50K/year. Their customer base wouldn't dry up overnight but over a few years, yo…

1. There is no reason to think that any university or organization would have given up its JSTOR subscription because an archive was made available on BitTorrent. At the very least, universities would want up-to-date articles, and so anything published after the archive was amassed (which would be a large number in just a year's time) would still motivate a subscription. There is also JSTOR's search service, and the general support universities have for the copyright system (to the point of abandoning their own academic mission when copyrights force such a thing).

2. Why should we care if JSTOR goes out of business because an archive is published? If JSTOR's only value is in their ability to enforce other publishers' copyrights, then they should go out of business because human knowledge should not be restricted by copyrights. Copyrights only made sense for academic publications when we needed the publishing industry to make scholarly writing available on a widespread basis; in 2013, we have this thing called the Internet (perhaps you've heard of it) that is vastly more efficient and costs far less.

So if JSTOR's search service is valuable, great, let's keep them around. If it is not, or if we can get the same thing without JSTOR (I suspect we could if we really tried), then we should let them and all the leeches whose publications they sell subscriptions to die quickly. Considering that a typical scientific journal publisher will not pay the authors of its articles, nor the reviewers, and often not even the editors, what exactly can they claim to be contributing to human knowledge to the point of justifying the continued restrictions on access to that knowledge that copyrights the publishers that hold them are imposing?

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#155

Post by jlgreco »

geuis wrote: post #135
pekk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not following your train of thought. What does "white people" have to do with anything?

> the message that US attorneys are going to hear is "don't fuck with young affluent white hackers with powerful friends"

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#156

Post by TDL »

mpyne wrote: post #148
TDL wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to look into how civil forfeiture laws are used in the U.S. Furthermore, if you have such a problem with this property why don't you make an offer to the property owner and buy it? Shutting down someone's business & stealing their property because you don't like it is deeply immoral.

> Furthermore, if you have such a problem with this property why don't you make an offer to the property owner and buy it? Maybe he pays taxes exactly because he expects that the government would do their job? No one person can buy up every piece-of-shit property and clean it up, that's the whole point of foisting that shit job (and it's certainly a shit job) on the government

I find it troubling that it remains acceptable to steal people's property on the premise that it is "blighted". This is nothing more that social engineering. Using violence to do away with something that you don't like is not morally acceptable.

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#157

Post by betterunix »

MichaelSalib wrote: post #77
jlgreco wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolute bullshit. There is no way in hell any university in a developed nation would drop their subscription to JSTOR. JSTOR keeps them on the right side of copyright law, keeps itself up to date, and provides infrastructure that the vast majority of university users find essential. Individuals not affiliated with universities may find such a pirated collection useful, but such individuals currently make up…

Journals in the library + interlibrary loan keep them on the right side of copyright law. And many more expensive subscriptions provide universities with access to parts of the JSTOR archive. What's more, there are no university copyright investigations to fear: no one is going to force grad students to prove that they legally obtained every paper they ever read (how could that even work?), but even if they did, grad…

"no one is going to force grad students to prove that they legally obtained every paper they ever read"

Nor would anyone hesitate to prosecute one of us (yes, I am a grad student) if we were to share an archive on BitTorrent.

"Universities aren't stupid"

Really? Part of my introduction to grad school was an annoying quiz about complying with copyrights and a bunch of reminders about the penalties I would face if I dared to infringe. Yes, really, my school takes copyrights that seriously, and guess what? My alma mater also subjected me to that sort of treatment during my undergrad orientation.

Do you really think universities are prepared to stand up to the copyright system? Do you think any mainstream university is going to suggest that people download an illegal archive of scholarly publications? I can tell you this: I would be shocked if any respected university official endorsed the use of an illegal archive of scholarly articles, textbooks, or anything containing even the tiniest amount of human knowledge.

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#158

Post by ahna »

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…

I've seen this sentiment expressed over and over here this week, and it's really frustrating to read.

Want to stop people speeding on a road? Issue tickets. In some sense, that's not fair -- people still do it and get away with it, why single out one person? But having a non-zero possibility of a negative consequence is a net disincentive to the behavior. Even if it's enforced somewhat randomly.

Hypothetically: let's suppose that our goal is to stop "the system" of prosecutors threatening multiple felonies against citizens for behavior that most other citizens do not consider worthy of a consequence as serious as jail time/felony conviction. Let us also assume that some prosecutors do this to get prestige/promotions. If there are well known examples of positive consequences, and no examples of negative consequences, then the incentives for our hypothetical prosecutor are pretty clear.

It seems fairly obvious that if Ortiz and Heynmann face seriously negative career consequences, it changes the cost/benefit calculation for other prosecutors, even those whose main concern is career advancement.

There aren't many ways to hold public officials accountable besides public outcry.

I do agree that the root problem is the human psyche. We have all kinds of bugs/heuristics (depending on how you look at it) for social behavior. These lead to group behaviors that us abstract thinkers find frustrating. Unfortunately, this isn't going to get fixed until 20+ years, and that's if you're on the optimistic side about transhumanism. So in the meantime we have to use the tools (and brains) that we have.

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#159

Post by nitrogen »

MichaelSalib wrote: post #124
ucee054 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Swartz wasn't profiting, it was civil disobedience As I've explained above, I don't think Swartz was trying to profit from this scheme. But I do think he was trying to destroy significant financial value (yes $50million/year is significant for me). And from a legal perspective, that's extremely serious. Now that's what I call "serious commercial value". JSTOR, not so much. So if I rob a bank and steal $30 million, th…

It seems to me you are arguing four separate points:

1. JSTOR has a commercial value of $50mil/yr.

This is a fair point, if that is indeed JSTOR's revenue (though "commercial" isn't exactly the right word to describe a non-profit organization's activities).

2. Aaron's intention was to destroy JSTOR.

Unless you have another source beside the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto[0] and the recent summaries posted online by those close to the case, I don't believe this at all. Aaron's intent, as expressed by the manifesto, was to increase access to knowledge. I also do not consider a federal indictment to be a reliable source for determining the frame of mind of the indicted.

3. Aaron's archive would have been a substitute for JSTOR access, and thus capable of destroying JSTOR.

The other responses to your comments have disproven this claim fairly effectively. JSTOR provides legitimacy to university libraries, it provides an active, searchable index, full text search, online viewing, and a continually updated collection. Aaron's collection of PDFs would provide none of that.

Furthermore, the original purpose of JSTOR was to free up space used by archived print journals, so your claim that print journals in the library stacks would substitute for JSTOR is demonstrably false.

4. Destroying a business model (of a non-profit organization, no less) is equivalent to stealing (e.g. your "if I rob a bank" analogy).

Despite arguing against the idea that Aaron wanted to or was even capable of destroying JSTOR's business model, I will briefly address this point.

Making a particular business model obsolete is not in itself criminal. This has been argued to death online, so just search for "buggy whip manufacturers."

[0] http://pastebin.com/cefxMVAy

Re: Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

#160

Post by malandrew »

mpyne wrote: post #142
temphn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The press will never get everything 100% accurate, but let's look on the bright side. A week ago, many lawyers (example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052339 ) were assuring us that seeing any accountability for Ortiz and Heymann would be a "fantasy", that this wasn't the way things worked, that hackers had to wise up and embrace their impotence. That wasn't the way things played out. With this (as with the mo…

> This week, at least, the lawyers' worldview was proven wrong and the hackers' worldview was proven right, in both the empirical and moral senses of the terms. Let's hope that continues. I've seen more prevaricating (and sometimes outright lying) this week from the hackers than from the lawyers so I, for one, hope that the lynch mob ceases immediately.

Examples please.
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