Internet censorship

[bell-the-cat]

Re: Internet censorship

Really Siggie - I'm surprised and disapointed that you wrote the above.

ANYONE can download whatever they want from JSTOR for free as long as they are accessing it through an account. The account used was MIT's JSTOR account, which Swartz had legitimate access to. Clicking "save as" is not hacking!

JSTOR created none of the works on its server, and JSTOR pays nothing to the actual authors of the works downloaded - because the works are either all out of copyright, or they are articles that can be extracted as royalty-free extracts from journals, or have been made free to access by the copyright holders. JSTOR pontificates about itelf being an enabler of academic research, however this case revealed JSTOR as just another corporate body - a company that wants to maintain its monopoly of being the SOLE SOURCE of those titles and was playing the US legal system to retain that monopoly.

Will Jimmy Wales, advocate and enabler of genuine and openly-admitted copyright theft on a vast scale (the wholesale theft of hundreds of thousands of digitised images created by the world's museums and galleries together with the setting up of teams of editors to remove the copyright notes from the stolen images) ever get threated with 30 years in prison? No - because the activities and goals of Wikipedia makes corporate America happy - it centralises content so that it can be easily controlled and eliminates or renders unimportant content that cannot be easily controlled (i.e content not hosted in the US).

I'm probably blackening JSTOR's name too much - they were just a bit player in the plan to convict Swartz. The main culprit was the FBI and the US department of "Justice", who had clearly decided to get him for his opposition to their fascistic SOPA legislation.

And I should have written "Really Sip - I'm surprised and disapointed and angry that you wrote the above". I think that you should apologise for writing it.

[Sip]

Re: Internet censorship

I apologize.

Now can I bring my laptop to your house to record all the shows you are receiving "freely" from your Sat or Cable provider so I can repost freely on the internets due to our "Freedom of Information"?

[Haykakan]

Re: Internet censorship

Its not the same thing and you know it. He pays for his cable content - JSTOR does not. You seem frustrated over the" give me" attitude you think is predominating in America yet America is still one of the most capitalist countries on earth. You seem to be as attached to reality as mr Romney was. Yeh sure all those mexican immigrants are working their asses off and living like sheet because of all the free goodies they get from our government. O and btw mr Romney lost the election because of all the illegal immigrants who do not even have the power to vote. So who is making up excuses now? Every generation thinks they had it tougher then the one following it and in some cases they are right and there is nothing wrong with that hell it may even be called progress. Honestly i dont see how you can complain about students who work full time and go to school and pay outrageous prices to do it plus have families.

I apologize.

Now can I bring my laptop to your house to record all the shows you are receiving "freely" from your Sat or Cable provider so I can repost freely on the internets due to our "Freedom of Information"?

[Sip]

Re: Internet censorship

Its not the same thing and you know it. He pays for his cable content - JSTOR does not.

It is exactly the same thing. Are you saying JSTOR does not have legal right to the content they have? I guess I don't understand what your problem is here. If JSTOR didn't have legal right to the content they have, why was this kid in legal trouble?

[Haykakan]

Re: Internet censorship

That is the whole point. Starting with the Bush administration and going even stronger with the Obama administration-the government has been working hard to destroy our civil liberties. A buncha laws were passed to make sure the government can convict you of bullkaka charges and put you away for good. Puting away people the government considers annoying is what this whole thing is about. If you stand up for your legal rights you can end up in jail. Only a brave lady judge stood up to the NDAA but that is not going to stop the government as you can see. JSTOR did not pay for the content it has so why should we?

It is exactly the same thing. Are you saying JSTOR does not have legal right to the content they have? I guess I don't understand what your problem is here. If JSTOR didn't have legal right to the content they have, why was this kid in legal trouble?

[Sip]

Re: Internet censorship

Payment is irrelevant. Does JSTOR have legal right to the content they have? If not, then I can see your point. But if they have legal right, who gave it to them? Notice that authors have rights to their works until they explicitly give it away or until a whole bunch of time passes and it becomes public domain.

[Siggie]

Re: Internet censorship

Doesn't JSTOR work as a search engine really? Like what's searchable through JSTOR includes more publications than are full-text and points you to the publishers website to purchase the full-text. As for those that are available in full-text; doesn't that depend entirely on the subscriptions of the institution utilizing JSTOR? Or am I missing something because my experience with this has been only in an academic setting? I have hit "save as" a lot... no one's come after me. Why? I didn't then turn around and try to distribute what I downloaded. You have permission to the full-text when your institution subscribes -- we do pay university/library fees that pay for this stuff. What we don't have a right to do is then take that article, access through EBSCO, LEXIS, JSTOR, etc. and then distribute it to others for purposes other than intended (Obviously a professor distributing an article to their class for the purposes of teaching is another story).

It's like buying a book -- you buy a copy of it not the rights to work. You can't then buy a printing press and start making your own copies to distribute. It doesn't matter if you bought the book, received it as a gift, picked it up at a garage sale, found in a trash bin, etc.

Or like using Google to locate and download a movie and then saying Google didn't pay for that movie, why should I?


----

As for book adoption decisions... I think this varies a little. Generally, I think the professor decides. In a few cases, I've seen the same book used or a single final given, etc. and that tends to be for the big big prereq's/gatekeeper classes, etc. E.g. like in a Chem 101 or something. Personally, I've chosen my own materials.

[Odysseus]

Re: Internet censorship

on the topic of internet censorship, this is a great video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKAaO26FAvA
This guy made printable gun parts, and he is talking about how once something is out online, it can never be taken back, there is always a way to get information.
I dont think anyone can truly censor the internet.

[Sip]

Re: Internet censorship

Other than perhaps my very early years of teaching, I don't think I have required students to buy any books. That is just criminal. More specifically, I have never insisted they have some specific edition since when a new edition comes out the older editions can be had for dirt dirt cheap.

When I was a student myself, I bought only the very fundamental books that I wanted to keep and the rest, I always managed to somehow find ways around having them (it also helped that I almost never read any of my books -- but that was probably more of being in the CS fields).

Now back to JSTOR, the publishers have the rights to the articles I think. The authors (academics), freely give them that right when they submit their papers to whatever journal of conference they are submitting to. You always have to sign some copyright release form. At that point, the publisher can do whatever the hell they want. It is completely irrelevant how much money changes hands and what costs what where ... if you don't have permission to download and share things the way the publishers and JSTOR see fit, you are simply doing WRONG. There is no such thing as "Freedom of Information" when copyright is concerned. The authors have given up their rights.

If you want to argue copyright law, that of course is a whole different thread. But here, it sounds like you are saying this kid was justified in his theft just because it was "simple" (as in save-as"), or "free" (as in well MIT had the license), or some other excuse.

What remains is that this guy took the easy way out every time ... for the articles, instead of fighting the laws and ownership (for example Google was in litigation for YEARS with book publishers in trying to make a crap load of books available for free to the public), he just took the easy way and decided to download things that didn't belong to him and <allegedly> "share".

When it came time to face consequences, which would very likely have been slaps on his wrist (I really really doubt he would have seen much prison time), what did he do? Yah he took the easy way out again.

[londontsi]

Re: Internet censorship

Another fly in the ointment, 3D printing.
How can you stop this.