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Aaron, 5 years later

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Re: Aaron, 5 years later

#91

Post by [deleted] »

tzs wrote: post #69
andreyf wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't consider Aaron's death a suicide, either. It was not exactly a Magnitsky-style beaten-in-prison death, but overly-zealous prosecutors trying to "make an example" of him had more to do with his death than mental illness. Note what happened, in that context, when someone who was not an American political activist did what criminal prosecutors were going after Aaron for: https://www.sciencealert.com/this-woman-h…

The scihub woman isn't doing any of the thing Swartz was being prosecuted for. All she's doing is copyright infringement.

[deleted]

Re: Aaron, 5 years later

#92

Post by newscracker »

If you haven’t watched “The Internet’s Own Boy”, [1] I’d recommend that you do. If you think about freedom, privacy, surveillance, abuse of power and related things, this will make you both sad and angry. We cannot truly have a better world without fighting for these and keep the struggles alive, because the powerful ones are good at retaining their power and at finding ways to keep people’s memories brief.

I’m glad that Sci-Hub exists. Though I’m not in research as such, it’s a painful exercise to find relevant information that’s useful and goes into some detail. I struggle with getting full papers from PubMed sometimes.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet%27s_Own_Boy

Re: Aaron, 5 years later

#93

Post by black_puppydog »

marvy wrote: post #89
sapper123 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the right to copy the paper an agreement between universities and the publisher? If so, can't the universities just give a middle finger to the publisher, cancel those rights and allow the research to be publicized for free, in the interest of furthering research, or is money that they get from the publisher that significant?

I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm pretty sure they get no money at all from the publishers. Other way around in fact: their libraries spend large fraction of budget subscribing to the journals.

Plus a one-time fee for every paper they publish. Whith the option to pay more and make it open access. And then the library of the same university will still pay to access this article.

Re: Aaron, 5 years later

#94

Post by kilotaras »

stryk wrote: post #59
jacquesm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's currently in hiding after Elsevier won an injunction. There's one company I'll be very happy to see the last of.

I still don't see why all the scientific paper publishing stuff is allowed to work in the way that it does. I mean, don't a large % of the people doing that research use funding from government grants? If public money was used to produce the research, then the public should have free and available access to it -- we already paid for it.

Public need doesn't always align with individuals incentives.

Public wants new high-quality, available knowledge. Individual researcher are incentivized to publish often and in high impact journals. This in turn leads to both lower quality research (see replication crisis) and preservation of status quo in publishing.

Re: Aaron, 5 years later

#95

Post by notthemessiah »

khazhoux wrote: post #61
pwaai wrote: post #31

His crime was scraping a website. The accusers killed an innocent man for violating Terms of Service. Who's the real criminal here? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/ninth-circuit-doubles-...

The prosecutors were in the wrong, but they did not kill him.

They wanted to throw him in a federal prison for 50 years. How is that not robbing someone of their life?

Re: Aaron, 5 years later

#96

Post by Vinnl »

jacquesm wrote: post #44
pazimzadeh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad Aaron and Alexandra Elbakyan never met. They might have made a good team.

She's currently in hiding after Elsevier won an injunction. There's one company I'll be very happy to see the last of.

Well, "in hiding" doesn't mean that much, I think. She's originally from Kazakhstan or Russia and, thus, can't really be touched by US court rulings. She probably shouldn't visit the US or many other countries, but otherwise probably hasn't had to change her lifestyle that much.

Re: Aaron, 5 years later

#97

Post by Vinnl »

stryk wrote: post #59
jacquesm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's currently in hiding after Elsevier won an injunction. There's one company I'll be very happy to see the last of.

I still don't see why all the scientific paper publishing stuff is allowed to work in the way that it does. I mean, don't a large % of the people doing that research use funding from government grants? If public money was used to produce the research, then the public should have free and available access to it -- we already paid for it.

It's not so much allowed to as well as that it's hard to change (although there's a lot of attempts to). A long-read on how it got this way at [1], and a shorter summary of why it won't change at [2] (which I wrote).

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

[2] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...

Re: Aaron, 5 years later

#98

Post by Vinnl »

sapper123 wrote: post #68
jacquesm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ostensibly you are not paying Elsevier to access the research, you are paying them because they obtained the right to copy the paper. That's the loophole that many of the writers use to publish pre-prints from their own homepages. That did not stop the publishers from suing them: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/elsevier-versus-open-access

Is the right to copy the paper an agreement between universities and the publisher? If so, can't the universities just give a middle finger to the publisher, cancel those rights and allow the research to be publicized for free, in the interest of furthering research, or is money that they get from the publisher that significant?

No, it's an agreement between researchers and the publishers, and the researchers feel dependent on the publisher for their careers (publishing in "high impact" journals is good for it), so they often blindly accept whichever terms the publisher shoves down their throats.

And no, no real money from the publisher is involved.

Re: Aaron, 5 years later

#99

Post by Improvotter »

I'd like to wonder what Aaron would be doing right now with Net Neutrality. He'd be at the forefront of all of these things against the Trump administration. He's the hero we need, that we deserve, but have tragically lost. RIP

Re: Aaron, 5 years later

#100

Post by omnimus »

wooter wrote: post #81
r3bl wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't take too big of a stretch to see the connection. No net neutrality: Big companies will be able to afford paying to ISPs to get into "fast lanes", smaller companies will not. SOPA: Big companies will be able to afford scanning user generated content for piracy, smaller companies will not. End result is pretty much the same.

I dont see that connection at all. In fact, it is the 'benevolent' government that has abused surveillance, tried to corruptly enable large companies to censor the internet under the guise of 'anti-piracy' (SOPA), and pushed Aaron to suicide through prosecutorial overreach which Net Neutrality proponents want to grant more control over the ISPs over fear-mongering (like piracy) of prices/throttling. (despite the obvi…

So you think Aaron would be against net neutrality?
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