JSTOR: What is it Good For? [PrawfsBlawg] JSTOR: What is it Good For? « Man tries to get house by adverse possession | Main | Posner and Vermeule: Cynical about Law, Dewy-Eyed about Politics » Friday, July 22, 2011 JSTOR: What is it Good For? Swartz is facing 35 years behind bars for allegedly cracking JSTOR. (Photo: Demand Progress) Information-liberation guru and alleged hacktivist Aaron Swartz is facing 35 years in prison on a federal indictment [PDF] for breaking into MIT's systems and downloading more than four million academic articles from JSTOR. But is JSTOR a good idea? JSTOR is a non-profit organization that digitizes scholarship and makes it available online – for a fee. For instance, on JSTOR I found a 1907 article called "Criminal Appeal in England" published in the Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation. What's more, by paying $34.00, I would take on some rather severe limitations under JSTOR's terms of service.
You might ask, why can't JSTOR just make this stuff available for free? And it's not just old, public domain articles. Shared notebook: 33 GB of Scientific Papers - and a Manifesto - Uploaded to Pirate Bay. An archive containing over 18,000 scientific papers, downloaded from the academic journal database JSTOR, has been uploaded to The Pirate Bay where they're now available as a torrent. The papers were uploaded by a user named Greg Maxwell who says that his decision to make the large quantity of scientific papers available as a response to the indictment earlier this week of early Reddit-er and Demand Progress founder Aaron Swartz. Swartz has been charged with felony hacking and computer fraud for downloading some 4.8 million papers from JSTOR. Sponsor While the government has labeled Swartz's actions as "stealing," some have questioned whether that's the right description for what Swartz did and whether a possible 35-year-sentence is warranted.
"Aaron's arrest should be a wake up call to universities-evidence of how fundamentally broken this core piece of their architecture remains despite d ecades of progress in advancing communication and collaboration. Discuss. 33 GB of Scientific Papers - and a Manifesto - Uploaded to Pirate Bay. Aaron Swartz & JSTOR.