But you should totally sign their petition.
As if being run by grifter Adam Green (to whom you should totally send three dollars, by the way) isn’t enough to stain PCCC and Bold Progressives’s reputation, PCCC’s co-founder Aaron Swartz was indicted for mail fraud today.
From AP,
A Harvard University fellow who was studying ethics was charged with hacking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles.
Aaron Swartz, 24, of Cambridge, was accused of stealing the documents from JSTOR, a popular research subscription service that offers digitized copies of more than 1,000 academic journals and documents, some dating back to the 17th century.
In an indictment released Tuesday, prosecutors say Swartz stole 4.8 million articles between September 2010 and January after breaking into a computer wiring closet on MIT’s campus. Swartz, a student at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, downloaded so many documents during one October day that some of JSTOR’s computer servers crashed, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors say Swartz intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites.
Swartz turned himself in Tuesday and was arraigned in U.S. District Court, where he pleaded not guilty to charges including wire fraud, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. He was released on $100,000 unsecured bond and faces up to 35 years in prison, if convicted.
[snip]
Swartz is an online activist who founded the website Demand Progress, which says it “works to win progressive policy changes for ordinary people.”The site describes Swartz as “the author of numerous articles on a variety of topics, especially the corrupting influence of big money on institutions including nonprofits, the media, politics, and public opinion.” It said he and another researcher once downloaded and analyzed more than 440,000 law review articles to determine their funding sources.
Demand Progress’s executive director David Segal said on the website that the charges against Swartz don’t make sense.
“It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library,” he said.
A Harvard spokesman said Swartz was placed on leave from a 10-month fellowship after the university learned about the investigation. He said the fellowship ended last month.
Swartz had legitimate access to JSTOR through Harvard, but the company has usage restrictions that would have prevented such colossal downloads.
The nonprofit JSTOR, founded in 1995, enables libraries to save space, time and labor by digitally storing centuries worth of academic journals. Its oldest publication is a Proceedings of the Royal Society of London from 1665.
Its annual subscription fees can cost a large research university as much as $50,000.
According to the indictment, Swartz connected a laptop to MIT’s system in September 2010 through a basement network wiring closet and registered as a guest under the fictitious name, Gary Host, in which the first initial and last name spell “ghost.” He then used a software program to “rapidly download at extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR,” according to the indictment.
In the following months, MIT and JSTOR tried to block the recurring and massive downloads, on occasion denying all MIT users access to JSTOR. But Swartz allegedly got around it, in part, by disguising the computer source of the demands for data.
In November and December, Swartz allegedly made 2 million downloads from JSTOR, 100 times the number made during the same period by all legitimate JSTOR users at MIT.
The indictment also alleges that on Jan. 6, Swartz went to the wiring closet to remove the laptop, attempting to shield his identity by holding a bike helmet in front of his face and seeing his way through its ventilation holes. It said that he fled when MIT police tried to question him that day.
An MIT spokeswoman said the school had no comment on the apparent breach.
McGregor said JSTOR recognizes it’s very difficult for any institution at any level to protect its data.
“Hacking is rampant,” she said. “Protecting systems is a huge challenge right now for any industry, and in the academic space it’s especially challenging because we all want to be as open as we can and have policies that promote use.”
I’m stunned, and don’t even know what else to say. Just…dayum! grifters gonna grift!
Also, too, I might be having a schadenfreudorgasm. I can’t really tell. I’m just sitting here with my jaw on the floor.
[Here’s Reddit disputing the original version of the New York Times which identified Swartz as a co-founder of Reddit.][image via New York Times]
[cross-posted at ABLC]**** Edited to correct description of charges — “Mail Fraud” to “Wire and Computer Fraud.” [8:20 pm]
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
Damn, I don’t know whether to give this a Yutsano sigh; an eemom DIAF; a “so full of win”; a “he didn’t say that exact phrase in the campaign if you will recall”; a Jane Hamsher/abominABLe snowlady; a “whatever Glenn Greenwald says I think the opposite”; a “liberals are the REAL racissssss!”; or a Tunch also too.
.
.
Dream On
It would be more damaging if I had ever heard of him.
Steve
He might play for the right team but I don’t really support what he did, or what he’s accused of doing at any rate.
MattR
Thoroughly confused. How is an open access guy grifting when he steals data to make it available for free to all? Lawrence Lessing agrees:
burnspbesq
Wait … what? Hack into JSTOR, the most boring database in the history of the universe?
This makes the Dumb Crime Hall of Fame on the first ballot.
JGabriel
ABL @ Top:
Except that this isn’t grifting. It’s more like pirating. And you have to wonder if maybe Swartz has a point? For example, you quote:
While I’m sure it’s nice that MIT digitized all these journals, and kept them archived for other libraries to use — I’m also thinking that the copyright protection on, for instance, a 17th century journal has expired. It kind of makes one wonder, then, why someone can only peruse an out of copyright journal if they have access to a library willing and able to pay the $50,000 fee MIT charges for JSTOR subscriptions.
ETA: I just pulled that information out of the quoted article. Maybe Swartz deserves to be charged and sentenced here, I don’t know. But, if it already looks funny based on the information the prosecutor released, what’s it gonna look like when Swartz actually gets to mount a defense?
.
mc
I’m confused. It’s pretty easy to access JSTOR content- what was his point?
General Stuck
We need a catchy acronym for its ok if progressives do it.
bonkers
Shirley Sherrod!111!!! (burp_..-_)
Dave EK
@ MattR
I’ll agree that it’s not grifting, it’s theft of a particular righteous asshole variety. It’s kind of like robbing a co-op to give food to the poor under the theory that food should be free.
Beta Magellan
Ah, their emails have been a routine irritant in my inbox for some time now. I saw the subject line of their most recent one, smiled, had a wry little laugh, and deleted it.
Rob
Why would this possibly reflect poorly on him or PCCC? There is no legitimate reason that stuff should not be freely available.
Cervantes
You’re somewhat confused. MIT is a JSTOR customer. MIT does not charge for JSTOR subscriptions — it pays JSTOR for one.
KCinDC
This seems to be IP law insanity. 35 years!? And a support petition claims “the alleged victim has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they’ve suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute.”
Just because you hate PCCC doesn’t mean anything bad that happens to anyone associated with them is reasonable.
stinkdaddy
Someone did something [that the entity they did it to doesn’t think is] bad. This confirms my preconceived notions about unrelated matters.
Menzies
@JGabriel:
That is where I’m at right now. I don’t know what’s up with this particular case, so I’m not making a judgment on the legal aspects of it. That said, I’m going to lose my library privileges in a year, and I kind of like having access to journal articles.
I’ll be watching, though – I use JSTOR routinely for research, and if this leads to them dicking all their other users over, I’m going to kneecap the little bastard myself.
Lolis
@stinkdaddy:
Yeah, I agree with you on this one. A big meh.
burnspbesq
OT, from the department of Nobody Could Be That Fucking Stupid, Except Governor Goodhair:
Perry’s top foreign policy advisor? Douglas Feith.
Yes, you read that correctly. No, I am not making it up.
Steeplejack
@Uncle Clarence Thomas:
No, you’re fine with your usual, Unc: ostentatious formatting around a short burst of complete bullshit.
KCinDC
Besides, Jane will be throwing PCCC out of the firebagger caucus for supporting a Senate run by Elizabeth Warren (who I suppose is an evil O-bot now).
Corner Stone
I’m confused. Should I continue becoming drunk beyond all measure, learn another bass lick, or give one fucking ounce of a shit to what ABL is peeing herself over?
Decisions…
Schad
@11
And not just that, JSTOR is a non-profit. It’s not a big, evil corporation charging for information that yearns to be free…it’s a group that has created an invaluable scholarly resource that’s available through most universities.
It’d be nice, I suppose, if JSTOR were open to all, free of charge. But until someone ponies up the millions necessary to keep their servers up, and the employees who have to digitize several thousand journals a month, I can’t exactly go on an anti-IP tear against their subscription model.
Corner Stone
@Steeplejack: I’m a little disappointed in you. Show some fucking respect.
Suffern ACE
@burnspbesq-Oh God. They never go away.
Corner Stone
And let me just tell you… I have a Ghost Pepper plant that is fucking mind blowing.
If any of you badass honkies wanna step up and come get some…
Let me know.
It won’t happen twice.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
okay, that’s too fucking funny.
Elizabeth Warren was an indispensable liberal and the only person who could run the new Consumer agency, but Hanoi Jane says Warren isn’t pure enough to run for the senate.
And then some of you wonder why she’s mocked and scorned.
General Stuck
I think Perry is a candidate for dems to worry some about, at least if they feel they need to worry about something. I do think he is a batshit crazy religious nut, and all around borderline sociopath, but he isn’t stupid, and is about the only wingnut that has a presidential gravitas, imo. He also has a loyal and very competent media team, I was reading about earlier today.
Being from Texas is a big minus after GWB, but I surely don’t write him off. And he matches up well with the various lunatic factions that make up the GOP activist base that do most of the voting in the primary. If he runs, I predict he wins the gooper nomination. easily. And will motivate the all important evangelical wingers to come out and vote in the general.
handy
@Corner Stone:
Yer just jealous cuz ABL’s milkshake brings
all theboyz to the yardCole his page hits.stinkdaddy
These people are figments of your imagination.
Corner Stone
@handy: It’s true. Blinky Cole gets to pull his horns in when she double snaps in a circle in his general direction.
Citizen Alan
All of those facts are irrelevant. All that matters is that in a fundraising pitch, he blasphemed against the Immaculate God-King, as explained in the hysterical tantrum contained in the first link. Ergo, no punishment of the heretic is too extreme or unconscionable.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
“These people are figments of your imagination.”
Yes, when ever Cole mocks one of Hanoi Jane’s clusterfucks, those 350 posts defending everything she does are figments.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Hell, that probably bumps him up in the GOP polls.
Because EW refused to hold a press conference [ETA] blaming Obama [/ ETA] for throwing her under the bus? Life imitates parody? Cause I think a few people called this last night.
hhex65
Hi-ho, copyfighters! Away!
Joel
This post would have been better if the readers had a little more background (other than the link). It’s not like the Adams are high profile figures. They’re pretty small potatoes. Also, the crime in question is unrelated to the goals of the PCCC. Sounds like standard anarchist-leftist stuff to me.
Big Pimpin
A Harvard kid stealing from MIT? What else is new?
:P
I think TLev will have the most insightful comments on this. As far as I know, most schools let you access JSTOR for free, so unless this guy was somehow scheming to use the database to make the ultimate plagiarism website, I don’t see what the problem is.
aisce
@ general stuck
hmm. yes. because acronyms are so tricky to come up with. good idea on outsourcing that one, stuck. wouldn’t want you screwing it up.
it’s ok if you’re…a fucking dumbass, stuck. iokifyafd.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
I think Elizabeth Warren is a good progressive, but I’m indifferent to anyone without a record.
But now that Hanoi Jane is attacking her – fuck – I’m all in. I’ll send Warren a maximum contribution.
Dollared
Wow. ABL, even for you this is staggeringly self indulgent and tribal. It sure seems like PCCC is right and Obama is trying to cut Social Security and Medicare. He says he’s open to it every goddamn day.
So what is your point about these people? That they understand plain English? Have you read the Gang of Six plan that our President said was “directionally” the right thing? Did you read the Social Security cut that is the first goddamn thing in the plan? Did you read the spending caps and the 67% majority vote to exceed the caps?
And then rejoicing because some guy you never heard of is going to jail for a copyright violation, just because he’s associated with these guys?
Get a real job and save us the effort of ignoring you.
Tom Q
27.General Stuck — I think Perry is the one candidate who could sweep the crazy vote and still get the party regulars to unite around him in the end, the way they did for Reagan in 1980 after he’d taken down the establishment’s hope Bush. If Bachman or Palin (or, totally implausibly, Cain) were to get the nomination, I think you’d see defections of some fairly big name Republicans, the way you did in the Goldwater debacle. Perry would be just as appalling, but the establishment would probably agree to pretend he was an acceptable choice.
I still think Barack’s a strong favorite, but Perry, while less of a threat than Romney, wouldn’t fall into “this’ll be a slaughter” territory the way Bachman would.
Martin
Nah. He’ll win all the states McCain won and that’s it. He has little independent appeal. How little? Well, he’s no George Bush, let’s put it that way.
jwb
General Stuck: Last I heard, Rove is working against Perry, and if anyone knows where to find Perry’s secrets, it would be Rove.
BTW, my sense is the Texas Goopers who are urging Perry to run are doing so because they want him out of Texas politics and if he runs he’ll either be gone to Washington or come back to Texas damaged goods and so greatly weakened.
Marc
Pro tip: the folks disagreeing with ABL would make a bit more headway if they didn’t come across as such raging assholes. If you turn everything into the eternal Obama flame war (which she didn’t bring up…notice that?) then you get the same thread over and over.
Having said that ,t his seems a bit more complex than you’re seeing implied in the title; it’s closer to a protest against mindlessly applied IP law. In other words, idealism, if misplaced, rather than greed.
General Stuck
So it looks like you’ve appointed yourself the new blog scold, flitting from one thread to the next looking for the shit. We can always use another clown to make it interesting around here, what with all the depressing shit going on. It would be nice if you and your fellow busy bodies could show a little more creativity to your troll vocation, but that is likely too much to ask for.
I don’t like hackers, and so called progressive ones even less. And I don’t give a shit what his cause was. Maybe he can get a cell next to Mr. Manning and they can play some grab ass to while away the hours of free time in their futures.
andrewsomething
Where’s the grifting?
Someone downloaded a massive amount of articles in order to most likely perform an academic analysis on them (judging from his prior work). While it might be illegal, and most likely violates JSTOR’s TOS (even though they seem to be opposed to prosecution), it doesn’t sound like grift to me.
What do you think about the actual situation? Do you think that he should serve 35 years for this?
He was formerly associated with a political organization that you dislike even though you probably agree with him on most issues. He seems to be a person, petty intra-left factionalism aside, who genuinely has tried to make the world a better place. Yet you derive pleasure from the fact that he may potentially spend 35 years in jail for downloading journal articles?
Calouste
Gosh, what a wanker.
Can’t he just contact JSTOR and tell them that he has a research project for which he would like to use the metadata or do a keyword search or whatever on 5 million documents? I’m pretty sure they could help him out with that. But no, he has to do it with his 1337 hacking skillz.
Marc
By the way, the linked Yves Smith article is dense with the stupid. Does he think that repeating the ludicrous phrase “veal pen” over and over again does something positive? Because for me it moves him into the “not worth reading even if linked” category…
El Cid
WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA!
Would you nitwits screaming about how ‘HA HA NAO THE DAM LIBSYMPS THINK WARREN NOT PURE ENOUGH’ read the god-damned article linked by Hamsher?
I don’t have to even read anything by Hamsher.
The twitter link was linked above. I clicked that link.
The argument by Yves is not that there’s something wrong with Warren, but that primarily she would be undercut by the Administration and the Democratic power structure.
Jesus fucking Christ — and you mock “pwogs” for being so irrational and yet you either don’t read or cannot make the slightest sense of an article primarily arguing that backing a Warren run for Senate would be ineffective and that it would be bad for Warren to maintain her involvement with the Administration which [in Yves Smith’s / Wheeler’s view] is undercutting her.
My fucking God you lazy ass nimrods.
[PROTIP: THAT THERE ARE INDEED SKEPTICAL COMMENTS ABOUT WARREN’S VIEWS CONTEXTUALIZED AS PART OF THE SAME ARGUMENT THAT SHE IS BEING ATTACKED AND UNDERCUT IS NOT A CONTRADICTION.]
Corner Stone
@Marc:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!…choke a little…HAHAHAHAHAHA!!
aisce
hackers? scolds? jailhouse butt sex?
wtf are you on about? what does any of that have to do with your apparent inability to create acronyms?
Corner Stone
@General Stuck: Shorter President Stuck:
How dare you challenge my au-thor-i-tah? !!
General Stuck
Yea, I was reading about their feuding earlier today. Sounds more like a pol rivalry than enemies. Romney just has a lot of flipping and flopping to bullshit his way out of with some of the major GOP primary factions. From the tea tards and his universal HC in Mass, to explaining why he isn’t a devil worshipper to the evangelicals. He might be the first GOP candidate whose platform is completely inter changeable, depending on who he is campaigning to.
Corner Stone
@Marc: Fucking moran.
El Cid
Read this fucking quote.
Which part of this attacks Warren for being part of the veal pen? Which part of this attacks Warren for being impure?
You don’t have to agree with any of the post. You ought, however, be able to comprehend the arguments.
Steeplejack
@Corner Stone:
Bass lick.
What book or book/CD (or DVD) would you recommend for a 12-year-old girl who has been studying regular “band” music (forget which instrument) but has recently gotten into bass guitar. This is the daughter of a coworker. I play guitar but haven’t doinked with a bass in years, and I’m not up on the state of the art vis-à-vis instructional stuff. Your insight welcome.
stuck working
Wow, I am stunned at this post. I don’t know the first thing about your beef with the PCCC or whatever, but you’re definitely letting it bias your understanding of this situation.
This guy downloaded articles from a popular academic database. He was entitled to access the database. He downloaded articles too fast, in a manner that violated JSTOR’s terms of service. That’s his offense. The database itself did not even want to press charges. Contra your hyperbolic headline, the New York Times more accurately headlines its story on this “Open-Access Advocate Is Arrested for Huge Download.”
Now, I’ll admit, I don’t have a clue what this guy thinks about Obama. But it doesn’t matter. For the government to press these charges with such penalties against him for this is outrageous. It’s sad you can’t see that because of a grudge.
ira-NY
Jane Hamsher said she opposes Warren’s Senate run, in part, because:
Comment #18 http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2011/07/16/obama-to-eliminate-elizabeth-warren-as-head-of-consumer-financial-protection-bureau/
Does that clarify where Jane Hamsher is coming from?
Corner Stone
@Dollared:
It’s obvious you’re not that familiar with her repertoire.
brendancalling
i’m generally an ABL fan, but this is a stupid post.
JGabriel
@Dave EK:
And the coop still has the food afterwards.
.
General Stuck
Because you have absolutely no sense of humor, that I was being serious about actually creating an acronym and bounce from thread to thread delivering flaky critiques that mostly miss the point, like with this one.
Or, in a word. you are a boorish fruit loop with nothing to offer worth having.
El Cid
If you want to make any accusations that would be in line with the view in the Yves Smith post (linked by Hamsher, which is what was linked above, and not some comment by Hamsher whose views I just don’t read) it would be that they’re too supportive or worshipful or hagiographic or whatever of that type of accusation you’d like to make.
Again, you don’t have to agree with any of these arguments, or even find them reasonable.
Yutsano
@Uncle Clarence Thomas: You’re not even worth the sigh anymore.
Corner Stone
@Steeplejack: I’m sorry, wish I could help. I’m taking tips from a friend’s brother who spanks a nasty funk bass.
Otherwise it’s just all by ear and drunkenly experimenting. I can’t help anyone who actually wants to learn the bass.
NobodySpecial
@General Stuck: Poor Stuck, someone took your job.
General Stuck
Stop picking your nose.
NobodySpecial
@General Stuck: Poor baby, reduced to the level of a three year old because the title of Blog Scold and Internets Sherriff has passed on to a new regime.
aisce
@ stuck
calling you a dumbass is never missing the point. gratuitous, maybe. insensitive to your condition, and the greater mentally challenged community, perhaps. but missing the point?
never.
boorish froot loop away!
FlipYrWhig
How is running for the Senate aiding and abetting the Obama Imperium? If the government were, metaphorically, analogically, a _tree_, the part where the president works would be, after a fashion, _one branch_, and the part where a victorious Elizabeth Warren would work would be, how do you say, ANOTHER ENTIRE MOTHERFUCKING BRANCH.
When I went to college, there was this guy who bought full-page ads in the campus paper about how the universe was really one giant plutonium atom, and he could prove it, with equations. That guy is to physics as Hamsher is to politics.
Xenos
Sounds like civil disobedience in a modern context here. I don’t see how downloading all these documents could give someone insight into research funding sources that would be all that different from analyzing a select group or random sample of articles from JSTOR.
This sounds as well thought-out as the law student who once tried using his student Lexis-Nexis account to print out his personal copy of the US Code.
Corner Stone
@brendancalling:
Seems to be pretty on par.
FlipYrWhig
From the strategist who brought you such viable ideas as the “Cannonball Run To Visit Bradley Manning While Sporting Expired License Plates.”
SST
Weak trolling. But maybe comments will soar. I dunno
ETA: Google is also very cool right now
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
oh please, el cid, Hanoi Jane endorsing the notion that Warren will be more useful/powerful at her Harvard desk than as a Senator is ridiculous, inconsistent, and opportunistic. Why just a couple of weeks ago they were fighting to the death to keep Weiner in Congress. They weren’t saying he would be more useful out of congress. Ditto St Russ. None of them are saying Feingold should stay out of office because he’s more useful on the outside the evil obama/democratic power structure.
Corner Stone
@NobodySpecial:
Have some faith. for FSM’s sake!
If there’s one thing President Stuck is qualified for, it’s Hardcore Blog Sherf.
I believe with all my little blog heart beat that he’ll handily defeat the intrepid interloper and recapture his rightful spot atop the scolds of blogtopia.
Suffern ACE
@El Cid: None of this makes any sense. Does Elizabeth Warren have any say in what she is going to do next? If the Administration wants to silence her criticisms, why not offer to make her Ambassador to New Zealand? Wouldn’t potentially having her in the Senate really piss them off if they want to silence her criticism?
I would have worded it differently – “People shouldn’t waste precious Progressive resources raising money for campaigns for people who haven’t announced that they are running for anything. Instead, that money should go to places, like say, Wisconsin elections, where candidates are indeed running.”
Something like that. It’s really up to Elizabeth Warren as to what she wants to do.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: Zing!!
General Stuck
Don’t worry bumpkin, I will continue to service your whiny nonsense.
Christ, every ABL thread becomes a worm hole for every BJ miscreant to pass through. And for those whining about ABL being unfair to Mr. Swartz, it really isn’t that difficult to understand. ABL supports president Obama and wants his to win another term, as do I, and the PCCC oppose that, and is fair game to go after, just the same as if they were republicans. They are in the Obot free fire zone, so buck up grasshoppers, it will get worse before it gets better.
Citizen Alan
Marc @ 42
I noticed that the first link was to a prior post on her own site that consisted of a few thousand words of squalling histrionic butthurt because a group devoted to preserving the social safety net complained about Obama hinting around about being okay cuts to social programs. Certainly that’s the only reason ABL felt the need to make this otherwise irrelevant post in the first place. It also totally justifies being ghoulishly gleeful about a young activist getting 35 in the federal pen for copying too many articles that he apparently had the legal right to download. I suppose it also justifies a throwaway joke from General Stuck about prison rape if you’re a soulless piece of shit like Stuck has proven himself to be.
Corner Stone
@Suffern ACE: “People shouldn’t pour precious Progressive resources propping campaigns for people who haven’t pronounced that they are propositioning a potential pronouncement. Preferably, those props should go to places, perhaps, like Wisconsin elections, where candidates are profundantly possible.”
Comrade Kevin
@General Stuck:
I think the legendary Bruce Campbell put it nicely, in Army of Darkness: “Buckle up bonehead, ’cause you’re going for a ride”.
General Stuck
WTF? “prison rape”? Are you fucking that stupid to think my comment was joking about that. Playing grab ass is a common term for people getting along as pals, or friends of a feather. jeebus, you fuckers are stupid.
Paul
I just don’t see the point of downloading all that stuff to make it available on file-sharing networks. It has limited appeal to academics mostly, anyway. And actually, with my public library card, I can access it online, at home, for free.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Dave EK @10
JGabriel @58
It’s more like someone stealing a small pizza company’s recipe for primo pizza sauce and allowing anyone, regardless of wealth, to acquire that recipe without having to pay a franchise fee. It has a chilling effect on anyone in the future who would spend time and money developing a new pizza sauce if all that’s going to happen in the future is that the recipe gets stolen and picked up by a megalithic entity that doesn’t want to buy the recipe.
Dollared
@ Temp Max, yup, Swartz is going to bring academic research to a halt. Worldwide.
scarshapedstar
These charges are bullshit. Hopping IPs is a crime? Changing your MAC address is a crime? Using up the download quota on a guest account is a crime? No, no, and no. Three non-crimes do not add up to one crime. This ‘hack’ is how you get around a ban on 4chan and any 13-year-old can do it.
Now breaking into the router closet is a crime, but he didn’t actually steal a goddamn thing, any more than taking more packets of fire sauce than you really need at Taco Bell is theft, and in that case you are actually using up resources.
Scholarly journals have a lot of nerve charging their weight in gold for subscriptions, and I’m sure this freaked them out, but I see him as a digital Robin Hood and these trumped-up charges are simply bizarre.
Steeplejack
@Corner Stone:
Okay, got it. I’ll tell her to just start drunkenly experimenting. What “gateway” liquor do you recommend for a 12-year-old just starting out?
JoshA
I demand this get a “Grifters Gonna Grift” tag.
NobodySpecial
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Except for the fact that all that stuff isn’t a trade secret. More like they developed a new pizza sauce, sent a copy of the recipe to a cooking magazine, and then someone takes the copy and posts it online. Which is why JSTOR wasn’t keen on pressing charges or even declaring that anything of value was damaged.
The guy’s dumb, but so is the application of this law.
Steeplejack
Man, just finished reading the complete thread. If only Web scientists could isolate the X-factor that makes some occasional thread degenerate quickly and completely into da stoopid. Is there some “lightning rod” effect at work? Inquiring minds want to know.
In a similar vein, I am switching from beer to rum.
phillygirl
ABL, I’m sorry, but I’m just fucking sick of you. Somebody who was friendly with Adam Green, who’s occasionally critical of Obama, gets in trouble for stealing journal articles. Who cares about any of this? Just go away.
scarshapedstar
Actually, forget 4chan, this is how you defeat the quota on Rapidshare. Download 150 mb, switch proxies, repeat. Someone come arrest me, I dare ya.
El Cid
__
Since you were one of the premiere hyperactive nitwits blissfully unconcerned with what the evil pwogs / firebaggers / whatevers were saying, at least here I can repeat what I wrote above:
I am not advocating the view of the linked blog post by Yves Smith.
I did not do so. I am not doing so now.
There is no way to interpret your comment other than that either you presumed that I was advocating the same view as Smith/Hamsher, or that I would be a convenient enough moniker at whom to address your points just because.
I was merely pointing out that what you were saying had nothing to do with the arguments of the linked blog post, which logically would have been the thing that prompted your initial primal scream of outrage at how the libsymps now had turned on Warren.
I don’t know how to clarify it any more lest it be to someone unwilling to comprehend:
There is a difference between supporting some argument/viewpoint or set of arguments/viewpoints and correctly identifying what it is or they are.
I guess now, though, since someone has pointed out to you what was actually written at the blog post you reacted so strongly to, it’s now okay for you to address the arguments/viewpoints as presented instead of the ones you presumed them to be.
Since I’m not a lazy reactionary, I thought it a good idea to read a post which had apparently prompted a good number of people to have quite strong reactions. Heaven forfend this catch on.
James E. Powell
So, like, is this guy right up there with the Murdochs? I never heard of him and I don’t recall reading anything about the organization. Why does this merit so much discussion?
Corner Stone
@Steeplejack:
Well, when I was 12 it was whiskey. But I’d migrated up from vodka by that point.
I’d say for a young girl just starting out rum has to be the drink of choice.
Oh…sorry bout that.
Comrade Kevin
@phillygirl: There’s a simple solution to your problem. Don’t read her posts. It’s as easy as that.
NobodySpecial
@El Cid: Dude, it’s Mike Kay, Troller Extraordinare who hates Jane Hamsher because she gave him the wrong phone number at the bar or something. He’s not gonna do ANYTHING honestly.
Corner Stone
@Comrade Kevin: There’s another simple solution too, Comrade.
El Cid
__
Preposterous! Per principled purposes, pro-forma politics promulgating politicians pushing packaged portrayals pendant upon purported progressive palliatives painfully pummels positive possibilities pace proletarian populism.
Corner Stone
@NobodySpecial: You forgot to include the term “execrable”. Can’t be applied enough regarding the execrable Mike Kay.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Nobody Special @87
And how do you think that those publications found their way onto the interwebs? Was it Samantha Stephens wiggling her nose, Jeannie doing her little nod, or a bunch of research universities spending a lot of money- which could have been spent elsewhere- to get this stuff copied and made available?
Hey, do you need to peruse a Proceedings of the Royal Society of London from 1665 for some research you’re doing? Well, you don’t have to pony up travel expenses from LA to Williamsburg to do so any longer! All we ask is that you- if you don’t have library privileges from one of our institutional subscribers- pony up $5 to help us continue our efforts to digitize even more ancient tomes!
Wait…WHAT? You’re getting your research material for free elsewhere? Well fuck that nonsense! Let Aaron Swartz start copying his library to the internet- all 4.8 million non-digitized, centuries-old fragile articles he’s got laying around.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
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@19 Steeplejacked
Please do not continue to use words you cannot define or use conclusions as arguments.
.
.
Corner Stone
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Did you even bother to read anything at all about this issue?
Yutsano
@El Cid: Mmm…I lurve it when you alliterate.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
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@61 Yutsano
Understandably, you are not the guiding authority on that subject, pipsqueak. Now, please retire to your filthy abode under the Aurora Bridge with haste.
.
.
Suffern ACE
@James E. Powell: It doesn’t in our regular tribal way. Other conversations worth having include the ridiculous prosecution of copyright laws which may lead this young man to a 35 year prison term because he MAY have had the INTENT to distribute (but hadn’t actually distributed).
Or we could discuss the high price of academic journals are so costly.
Or we could discuss the irony of an ethics fellow at Harvard being charged with stealing and wonder if that elite institution is still turning out students capable of leading us to a more ethical and just society.
Lots of things to discuss. Just none of them related to Jane vs. the Obots.
Woodrow L. Goode, IV
I find it very sad– although quite revealing– that someone who claims to be upset by injustice is attacking someone who is completely innocent.
I hate to break this to you, but until Adam Swartz has been convicted of something by a jury, that’s what he is. Innocent.
He hasn’t confessed or pleaded guilty. Until that happens, if you believe in our system of laws, you have no business assuming that he is a criminal because “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
If you want to argue that no one who gets indicted is ever innocent– that prosecutors are infallible and unbiased and justice in this country is always administered impartially and without bias, you’re welcome to do so.
This post demonstrates that you’re an authoritarian who believes that oppression and intolerance is perfectly acceptable, as long as it’s being applied to people you dislike. What, exactly, is the difference between you and the teabaggers?
Yutsano
@Uncle Clarence Thomas: You seem to be investing much more emotional energy in me than I am in you. This is quite revealing.
bmull
It obviously doesn’t take much to be a blogger for Balloon-Juice.
joeshabadoo
So “grifter” is the new go to word when you want to smear someone or someone pisses you off. Doesn’t matter what they do call them a grifter.
Joel
We need more Murdoch schadenfreude. Can someone order Roger Ailes a wetsuit?
Corner Stone
This all seems kind of thinly sourced to me.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
El cid, you lost the argument, all the defensiveness in the world won’t reverse the results.
Hanoi Jane’s position that Weiner/Feingold/Grayson are more useful in office is inconsistent with her endorsement that Warren is more useful out of office. Period.
Why is she being inconsistent? It’s obvious, because unlike the Three Stooges, Warren has made it clear, she’s a strong supporter of Obama, which to Hanoi Jane disqualifies Warren as a “True Progressive”. That she endorses a view that Warren wouldn’t be able to criticize fellow democrats like St Russ or St Weiner, which is so plainly insulting to Warren’s character, intelligence, and achievements, that it exposes the hatred she only reserves for obama “dumb mutherfucking” supporters.
Fin
NobodySpecial
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): I was merely pointing out that you’re using a shitty analogy.
You seem to think that means that I devalue what JSTOR does.
Would you like some warm milk?
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
NobodySpecial, only a sad, lonely geek, who lives in his mother’s basement like you would refer to Hanoi Jane in a sexual context.
No one of Importance
What are you, five? you piss off, shit for brains. And take your little troll pal, bmull, with you.
The Raven
It turns out that Swartz is a friend and colleague of Henry Farell of Crooked Timber (and George Washington University.) It also appears that the matter has been settled with JSTOR, the alleged victim, who is urging clemency.
Prof. Farrell comments:
Discussion over at Crooked Timber:
http://crookedtimber.org/2011/07/19/aaron-swartz-indicted/
Discussion at Wired:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/swartz-arrest/
Sometimes best to do one’s homework before crowing.
Croak!
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
Oy vey. I’m sure you feel that way about Bush and Cheney.
I could care less about some impotent geeks like PCCC, but at least be consistent in your arguments.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
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@108 Yutsano
You seem to be investing much more emotional energy in me than I am in you. This is quite revealing.
.
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cbear
Yeah. Unfortunately that ship sailed some time ago.
Corner Stone
@The Raven: I have to confess I don’t understand your addendum. Do you mean to suggest there’s not an issue here? That JSTOR is not calling for the guillotine for -Jane Hamsher- some anonymous muffin who has a history of good works?
That this story was thinly sourced to begin with and basically fucking garbage upon more than a cursory glance?
What are you trying to say?
wetcasements
This post is all kinds of stupid.
bonkers
I cannot WAIT to see Glenn Hamwald’s next article extolling to virtues of rigidly following the RULE OF LAW at all times. So many here are making excuses for Adam Green’s co-founder friend, but y’all taught me that we MUST ALWAYS follow every law at all times. Anything less is tantamount to treason. What gives, “true progressives?”
And when are you brave online patriots gonna start your own party already, and quit spending countless hours a pro-Democratic blogs chastising the Democrats there who support the Democratic President (who just so happens to be melanin-enhanced, mind you…)?
It takes a lot of time, energy, and money to launch a viable 3rd Party bid. Get on with it already. Time’s a wastin’!
Brachiator
Good point. If you check out the TWIT show Tech News Today, you will find host Tom Merritt essentially saying that it doesn’t matter how the information got to be digitized, or how much money was spent on the effort. There is a kind of free floating infantile libertarianism among many techies that demands that once something is available on the Internets or exists as easily duplicated and downloaded, then it must be free.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
ooops. so much for the vaunted “rule of law”.
it’s okay if you are a true progressive.
Comrade Kevin
@The Raven: Those two articles are definitely worth reading.
Joel
@The Raven: Even in the context of Farrell’s comments, I have a hard time mustering sympathy for Aaron Swarz. The relevant response to Farrell’s post is here, from mitgrad (comment 42 in that post):
Never mind the fact that we’re talking about a non-profit entity that provides a useful public service and is readily available to most people who actually need it.
mcd410x
I swear I remember when front-page trolling was better than this. Quo vadis?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Corner Stone @101
Yeah, I have.
From Reuters:
I can think of some potential harm. Did Swartz hack into articles that are beyond the wall? Publications uploaded by JSTOR, but not yet available due to the wall? If so, what sort of chilling effect does this have? Will publishers be less willing to give JSTOR access to their publications? How will this effect research?
Allan
Sign the petition at PCCC!
Demand that Obama free Adam Swartz or else you’ll withhold your financial support and volunteer hours from his reelection campaign!
Catch Adam Green tomorrow on Rachel. And you can click the box below to make a small donation to support our continued operations.
Dennis SGMM
@Corner Stone:
“Thinly sourced fucking garbage” should be added to the tags here.
Felanius Kootea
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Affect, not effect. Okay that’s pedantic and my pet peeve and has nothing to do with the general point you’re making so I’ll just slink away now ;).
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Corner Stone @wherever
Bass player. Seems to know what I’m banging out at C&L from time to time. Houston, right?
Stanley, is that you? If so, we were missing your ass last night.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Felanius Kootea @132
If I wasn’t so intent on typing out my next one, I would have caught it. I’m kinda pedantic that way m’self. No harm. Hold your head high.
FlipYrWhig
Gross. This sounds like Rich Lowry watching the vice-presidential debate.
stuck working
@ Temp Max, notice that you had to invent an action not mentioned in the indictment to find even a potential for lasting harm.
Also, as a general point, I’d add that the indictment cites no real evidence whatsoever that he intended to distribute these files. In addition to the injustice of pursuing disproportionate charges for a minor offense, I don’t see how they can win a conviction if that’s so, which makes the whole prosecution an even bigger waste.
Dennis SGMM
All else aside, for someone with Swartz’ supposedly mad skillz he sure was a dumbshit. He could have easily set up bots to download several articles at a time at intervals and no one would have been the wiser. The first rule of hacking a database is not to crash its users while you’re doing so.
Suffern ACE
@FlipYrWhig: Nah. He’s only “intellectually attractive.” Whatever that means. IDK-he’s not all that bad looking. He might clean up well and it would help if he bought a collared shirt or two.
Lysana
If a blogger is judged by the quality of her trolls the same way a person is judged by the quality of her enemies, ABL is one of the best bloggers ever.
Gods, you people are BORING.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
stuck working @136
Because it’s legal makes it neither moral or ethical. Doesn’t make it smart or wise, either.
FlipYrWhig
@ Suffern ACE : After the catalog of this guy’s many wondrous attributes, “exploding out of it” seems a bit of a Freudian slip.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
stuck working @136
What are the parameters of the sentence and fine if found guilty? I’m seeing as much as 35 years and $1M, but I’m not seeing the minimum.
stuck working
@ Temp Max, maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment and link, but it seems a bit non-responsive when the subject is a criminal prosecution, no? I’m happy to concede that this guy’s action were potentially unethical and likely dumb, but that doesn’t justify arrest and $100,000 in bail.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Felanius Kootea @132
Yeah, I caught the next one too late, too.
Fixed.
Alex S.
@ KDinDC, 20:
What the… This seat could turn out to be extremely important… This woman, Jane Hamsher, is definitely not a friend of progressives.
bonkers
Hey, all y’all excuse-makers for the alleged RULE OF LAW-BREAKER Aaron Swatch: dude was indicted, yo. Those who enforce THE LAW decided that Mr. Born-in-1986 broke A LAW. Capiche?
The grifting reference is clearly about the PCCCCCCxC and the full-on hate-on-President-Obama at all times, while these same “progressives” use their hatred of America’s first melanin-enhanced President, and easily demonstrated most Liberal President in many decades, to raise money….constantly…to undermine President Barack Hussein Obama…see, that’s the grift. Got it now?
Yes, Aaron Swartz is innocent until proven guilty, but unless you believe he was indicted through some Hawaii-Daley Family-Cambridge, Mass alliance conspiracy to stifle opposition to President Obama, it’s looking like PCCC co-founder Swartz is untrustworthy.
Suffern ACE
@FlipYrWhig: That’s true, but i’m guessing it’s conscious construction. “Intellectually Attractive” saves him from adding “No homo” to the end of that sentence. Which is good, since I didn’t much like that year in pop culture.
cbear
It has, although it’s been shortened to three letters.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
stuck working @143
And without those measures, what’s to prevent him from doing something legally questionable again while awaiting trial? That’s sorta the point of bail, isn’t it?
Yutsano
@bonkers: Any good prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich. He’s not guilty until he’s convicted. Oh, and he did act in an unethical and reckless fashion. If JSTOR wanted they could sue him for malicious mischief.
Judas Escargot
@scarshapedstar:
Thank you for this sane response. This “crime” is roughly on par with kids stealing cans of soda from a vending machine. So why the big guns?
Obama’s FBI seems suddenly, oddly keen to prosecute computer thoughtcrime this week. Makes me wonder wtf happened recently behind the scenes to drive this crackdown…
Judas Escargot
@scarshapedstar:
Thank you for this sane response. This “crime” is roughly on par with kids stealing cans of soda from a vending machine. So why the big guns?
Obama’s FBI seems suddenly, oddly keen to prosecute computer thoughtcrime this week. Makes me wonder wtf happened recently behind the scenes to drive this crackdown…
bonkers
Cannot. Stop. Laughing.
Will Reks
Not one of ABL’s best posts.
Dennis SGMM
@Judas Escargot:
It wouldn’t require anything happening behind the scenes to initiate a widely publicized War on Hacking.
El Cid
bonkers
Oh, aren’t you adorable. Run along now…the 3rd Party isn’t going to create itself now, ya hear?
Judas Escargot
@Steeplejack:
Liberals dont like technical types.
If this kid was a lawyer, they’d be calling him a freedom fighter.
Felanius Kootea
Oh wow, I just found Aaron Swartz’s take on ethics in his own words. Fascinating. I am not totally unsympathetic to some of his points but I can see why Harvard’s Ethics Center placed him on leave once they found out about the investigation. (My hero Paul Farmer was known to steal microscopes from Harvard to donate to clinics that lacked basic equipment in Haiti, and I would have hated to see him arrested for something like that, but where do you draw the line? JSTOR is itself a nonprofit – thousands of users at MIT went without JSTOR access because of his downloads.) I wonder why the US Attorney’s office decided to press charges even though JSTOR wanted to drop the whole matter?
stuck working
@ Temp Max, I guess I still don’t see the point of your post @ 140 then. I thought you were suggesting that what he did was wrong even if it wasn’t illegal. In response, I said that your characterization of his actions might be right, but if they’re not illegal or represent a very minor offense, they don’t justify his arrest, incarceration, and prosecution. As I understand it, your response @ 149 is to say that the point of arresting him is to make sure that he doesn’t do the same dumb but (possibly) legal things he did before. I assume you’re not actually defending the practice of arresting people to prevent them from doing dumb but legal things, but if you’re not saying that, I don’t see how your comments hang together.
In any case, I’m going to bed now. I hope that folks are willing to take a look at this case outside the tangential framework of PCCC/Obama and consider what they’d say about this indictment if the alleged perpetrator was someone else.
Steeplejack
@Corner Stone:
Har-de-har-har. Really, my vision is blurred with tears of laughter. A touch, sir, a definite touch. You have pinked me to the quick! Now off you go to spank your nasty bass.
Steeplejack
@Uncle Clarence Thomas:
.
.
[yawn . . .]
.
.
ETA: Did I do the formatting right? Gosh, my post seemed so much more potent than usual.
Dennis SGMM
@Steeplejack:
I pied UCT before his ever increasing use of whitespace exceeded the ability of my arthritic fingers to scroll past it.
Yutsano
@Steeplejack: Not. Even. Worth. The. Sigh. The beautiful part was the abject surrender. I LOLed at that.
@Dennis SGMM: Mea culpa. I’m just slightly bored.
Judas Escargot
@Dennis SGMM:
If this were a case of “hacking”, there’d be a point. But he already had legal access to these files via Harvard… he was indicted for downloading too fast.
Ten years ago, what this kid did was called “being clever”. He’s no Julian Assange.
This is like dispatching Navy Seals to deal with a minor traffic violation.
Resources
James E. Powell
@Yutsano:
Why is it always a ham sandwich? I’ve asked prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges. No one seems to know. But everyone agrees, it’s a ham sandwich.
bonkers
Oh goodie. Perhaps “we” should all donate $3.25 (in honor of FDL’s 325 new members from their many-months membership drive), to the Free Swatch Fund at PCCC. The only problem will be…who to free first: Mumia, Peltier, Manning, or Swartz? Commence the caterwauling!
Judas Escargot
Can’t help it. Good genes.
Arclite
@ Dave EK
Actually, it’s not like this at all. JSTOR still had all of it’s “food.” There wasn’t anything missing. It’s like you took microscopic DNA samples of the food at the coop, cloned it, and gave it away to the poor for free, leaving all the coop food in pristine and saleable condition.
Yutsano
@James E. Powell: Because turkey is never guilty.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
stuck working
What he intended to do with the JSTOR files may or may not be illegal. For argument’s sake, I’ll say it’s legal.
Going into a basement at MIT- which receives hundreds of millions of dollars a year to do federally sponsored researc research- and secretly wiring your laptop to their computer system is certainly illegal.
And given that research being done at MIT at the behest of the federal government is then at risk of being compromised in some way (stolen, changed or deleted), and the fact that the internet is the bailiwick of the federal government that created and oversees it…And seeing that Swartz was caught red-handed removing that laptop from the wiring closet at MIT…And seeing that doing the same somewhere else is as easy as hooking wires up at one of the many other research universities that populate a relatively small area radiating 100 miles out from Boston…Yeah, they’re throwing the book at him in the indictment, and they’re making sure he can’t do again what he’s suspected of doing with the bond.
I hope I didn’t leave anything else in the ellipses this time.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
bonkers-
If you’re the bonkers I think you are, I’ve missed you.
If you’re a different bonkers, then…Good enough. I like you, too.
magurakurin
Not sure why he did it. Did he want to run some sort of search through a massive amount of articles and the normal method of access just didn’t allow it? I have access to JSTOR and heaps others because I graduated with an MA from the California State University system. I became an automatic alumni, for which I have to pay nothing, and get access to the library system. Surely, other colleges have a similar thing. It seems if he wanted to run some sort of massive search for some sort of research he might have been able to get permission to do so. The article doesn’t seem to say his reasons for doing it.
bonkers
Eric Torkelson? Is that you?!?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
1970s’ Packers’ special teams captain FTW!
magurakurin
I see it know. The article says he wanted to distribute them for free. Nothing more the down-trodden need than access to a journal article about Jacques-Louis David’s “Paris and Helen.” That will set them free. Fuck. Isn’t JSTOR more or less already free if you have a library card? What was he going to do, set up another JSTOR database, but for free? How was he going to pay for the servers? Donations? Wouldn’t it make more sense to advocate for more money for libraries so that more public libraries could offer public access to the databases? Seems fucking silly to me, what he did.
Mr. Poppinfresh
My favorite part about the perennial ABL threadshit posts are the way her supporters all pile out to engage in the worst, most illogical argumentation in her defense. El Cid knows what I’m talking about now, it would seem.
When in doubt, accuse everyone who thinks you can’t make a coherent fucking argument of being either a secret ‘firebagger’, or of being a troll. Never mind that some of us were here a long, long fucking time before ABL strolled up to write poorly researched ad hominem posts…
R. Porrofatto
Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison for wire fraud, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer.
A random selection of punishment for other crimes
– Samuel Israel, convicted of fraud and conspiracy in ripping off $300 million from investors in his fraudulent Bayou Hedge Fund Group. Sentence: 20 years
– Daniel Marino convicted of same. Sentence: 20 years.
– Raj Rajaratnam, convicted of insider trading that netted him $100 million. Maximum sentence: 20 years
– Jeffrey Bruteyn, nine counts of securities fraud ripping off $50 million from 600 investors in AmeriFirst Funding Corp. Sentence: 25 years
– Igor Poteroba, investment banker at UBS, convicted of insider trading. Sentence: 22 months
Admiral_Komack
@21. Corner Stone – July 19, 2011 | 11:51 pm · Link
Well, you could drink her pee, then shut the fuck up.
Glad to help.
stuckinred
The Apple Store is being updated, here comes Lion!
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
@magurakurin:
Not nearly on this scale, and not in many communities.
If you are not a member of a participating institution, you simply cannot order many JSTOR articles. At all. Your next best bet is to go to your local library, and get them via Inter-Library Loan; your Public Libray’ll connect with one that has a subscription, and get the articles for you. Due to budget cutbacks, many of those libraries’ll charge you a buck or two to get them.
I’m deeply depressed at the level of discourse here, actually. I’m someone who does exactly that kind of non-academic institution backed research that JSTOR makes hard to work with, and I’ve cursed out their names quite a few times. I promise you, I’m far more invested in an easy-to-access JSTOR than most of you appear to be.
Yet so many of you insist there’s no crime here. BULLSHIT. The very article underlines that he didn’t just jump his quota, he’s alleged to have went way over any reasonable need for articles, even for research into said articles (and where, exactly, is he going to publish research based upon stealing 5 million articles, eh?)
Moreover, to do so, he’s accused of physically breaking into an area he wasn’t supposed to have access to, and wiring equipment to that area to make this happen. That, too, is a crime.
I admire JSTOR for advocating letting the case go. But it’s not in their hands with felony crimes.
I do not admire the bulk of you who blindly misread an article to insist crimes were not committed, or if they were, they “weren’t that bad”. Or the person who insists we cannot judge the guy because he’s not been to trial yet. Oddly, I don’t recall you posting such sentiments around the Murdoch case.
Wankers.
stuckinred
Jarvis Hill
This thread is dead, do you think people are going to wake up and come back to read your outrage?
MikeJ
You did, stuck.
I’d agree with him too.
stuckinred
I did not come back, I was in the land of winkin blinkin and nod when this started. In addition. . .whatever.
Bobby Thomson
Just checking in. The comment at 181 is dead on.
alwhite
one of the most important differences between the right and the left has always been that the right takes whatever their leader says or does as the word of god that must be defended at all costs & all heretics must be burned. The left, well, not so much.
The end result is you get morons following Boy Blunder off a cliff (and dragging all the rest of the country with them) simply because they follow blindly. You never saw questioning or challenging from the right for any hair-brained dipstick idea he proposed or and dumbass stunt he pulled. The country is worse off because of that.
I actually think it is a strength of the left that – in general – we don’t do that. Our leaders are constantly (sometimes too much) challenged to explain and clarify and justify. The end result is better government and a healthier country.
ABL, sadly, has appointed herself the Inquisitor General for President Obama. As ‘Torquemada’ even obscure liberals who are not sufficiently obsequious must be brought in to the holy office and made to confess.
Its sad for two reason. First it is behavior liberals should abhor. Second, ABL is a decent writer who used to produce thoughtful and well written stuff; now she is like the crazy uncle who ties every bad thing in the world to the ZOG and spends his free time looking for the non-existent evidence the they control everything.
What material is this guys kitchen counter tops made out of?
MattMinus
I want to know about his countertops.
Edit: I see I was beaten to the punch.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
Its OK If You Are A True Progressive
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
This is pretty weak for you, ABL, especially since you are a lawyer. This isn’t grifting, and you’re letting your personal grudge get in the way of that. If our electronic laws had been written correctly, we’d have a better term for it, but what we do have is a violation of the terms of agreement for using JSTOR. But, if we had better laws, Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill @181, this would be a minor case, because nothing has been stolen other than a large amount of bandwidth. His charges should relate to the work everyone had to do in order to keep the computer systems working correctly for those who were using it for legitimate purposes. The best library analogy is that he has taken all of the books off the shelves, stacked them near the copiers so that he can have his own copies, with plans to put them back on the shelves when he done. (But even that’s not entirely accurate.)
SBJules
His major was ethics. Jeez
Lydgate
Hello! This is supposed to discredit him? Not in my world.
Geez, take your damn partisan blinders off.
Anonguest84
THE RULE OF LAW.
.
I think I remember reading somewhere that once upon a time it was illegal for some people in America to eat at certain lunchcounters or to ride in the front of the bus.
Ash Can
@stuckinred: I woke up, read it, and think it makes far more sense than 98% of the other comments in this thread.
Bobby Thomson
Bull fucking shit. That stuff wasn’t in the public domain.
ET
I am not sure most of the commenters here understand licensing restrictions. This was the problem he seem to have run afoul of. Those are legally binding contacts between the vendor and the university on behalf of the students. So yes he was stealing. Downloading 1, 2 or 5 articles for a paper is one thing, downloading thousands is an entirely different.
He can say he was going to put them up for everyone on the Internet and you can applaud because that means you don’t have to pay for them or because you don’t think you should have to, but JSTOR wouldn’t know that going in and even if they did they wouldn’t care. The money paid by subscribes keeps all database going technically. for JSTOR, the money also means that new journals that weren’t previously digitized would be digitized.
As a librarian, every day I am confronted by people who don’t understand that the print books and the databases that they use do actually cost money. They may not pay $50 do buy/use it when it is pulled off the shelf or accessed at a computer but your taxes for public libraries and student fees for universities are paid for those purposes. They think it is free because searching on Google is free, but it cost money for the university to buy it and they and their students have to abide by the licensing agreement. For me they should prosecute him.
Do I think electronic copyright law needs to be reworked? Yes. But that needs to be taken up in Congress as they have the power to change the law. This was a violation of the law and a contract and he got called on it – regardless of his intent or the “purity” of his goals.
Anya
This is insanity. ABL, WTF! Are you cheering for the imprisonment of a young man for such a bogus crime? I hate the Adam Green character but this is just not right. The alleged victim is not claiming any loss, so who did he commit the crime against? WTF??
Bobby Thomson
More often the problem was that it wasn’t illegal for private actors to discriminate and not allow some people to eat at lunch counters or ride in front of the bus. Either way, the comparison to laws prohibiting theft is both ridiculous and offensive.
There really should be a corollary to Godwin’s law relating to this shite.
Bobby Thomson
No, the best library analogy is that he backed a U-Haul into the library through a plate glass window, took all the books, scanned them, uploaded them onto a web site that he planned to make available to anyone without charge, and then put them back without paying for any of the damage he caused.
General Stuck
Too many of the comments on this thread are way way over done for slamming ABL, for reporting the arrest and charging of a person connected to Obama hating leftists she doesn’t care for. Which is perfectly within her purview to do as a front pager on this blog. She offers very little of her own commentary to this post, other than being somewhat shocked at this event, but not sad. She does not pronounce him guilty, except of grifting, which she relates to the activities of the PCCC, which I fully concur regarding that sleezy org.
The pile on that is this threads comment section, is basically identical in tone and tenor with the usual pile on when Obama so much as grins the wrong way and is construed as history’s greatest sellout and all around villain to the cause of progress. When nothing is further from the truth..
And “thinly sourced”. Really? The charges come from the DOJ, which is basically all ABL relays for that info. Unless you think the DOJ is thinly sourced on what it is itself doing.
Pathetic whining commentary from too many. When you get to be a BJ front pager, then you can write your own articles to whine about how their quality doesn’t meet your precious standards. Until then, kindly kiss my ass before going back to sucking your collective thumbs. I have my own ideas what motivates a lot of you.
rikryah
GRIFTERS GONNA GRIFT
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
Dennis SGMM
@Judas Escargot:
I understand that what the young man did was more akin to breaking and entering than it was to hacking. I also believe that the general public might not make that distinction.
My thought was that a political administration might be tempted to use the justifiable concern over actual hacking to parlay this and other cases into a War on Hacking in order to give the impression that it’s doing something about it. This would be another “War on …” that would be just as futile and wasteful as the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism for many of the same reasons.
The Tragically Flip
@FlipYrWhig 12:29 am:
This is naive. You know the President has powers that aren’t written down in that 18th century document right? Little things like being the leader of the political party that half the Senators belong to, with tremendous influence over how much fundraising help they get, what committees they are on, and whether their legislative priorities get taken up or ignored?
When was the last time a Democratic Senator was directly critical of a Democratic President the way any outsider can be? Lieberman pissing on Clinton over Monicagate is the closest I can think of. Before that I think you need to go back to Dixiecrats railing on LBJ. Even Sanders (who technically isn’t a Democrat) will oppose the President’s policies from a position of “the President and I have a different view…”
xian
so the hamsherites thought Warren would be freer ton criticize democrats as an administration appointment?
Lydgate
General Stuck: you could have gone so far in the Politburo.
And just to preempt you– no, I’m not comparing Obama to Stalin.
General Stuck
You can go far, fired out of my Clown Cannon for having nothing of substance and everything of weak invective to offer.
AuldBlackJack
@ Bobby Thompson
Once upon a time in America certain people were considered property and it was ‘theft’ when that right of property was denied the owner. It was, you know, THE RULE OF LAW.
Tuttle
Punish the blasphemer!
Good gods ABL, you’re getting creepier and creepier.
The Tragically Flip
@xian: The CFPB is part of the Federal Reserve, so I assume the Director is about as independent as the Fed Chair (a level which I am sure opinions vary considerably).
I also think it wasn’t so much about freeing her to be critical of the Admin, as being able to actually do stuff that pisses off the malefactors of great wealth. In the Senate, the only way she’s going to get things done that matter is if she can get consensus behind her ideas and have them make it into law. That is a different role than leading the CFPB, which has direct regulatory power.
Admiral_Komack
8. General Stuck – July 19, 2011 | 11:31 pm · Link
“We need a catchy acronym for its ok if progressives do it.”
“Obama made us do it…so that MAKES it OK!”
General Stuck
Admiral_Komack
LOL, not bad
liberal
@10 Dave EK blithered,
The merits of this particular case aside, that analogy is baseless, because food is a rival good, whereas electronic articles are not.
The Tragically Flip
Incidentally, I’m not sure I agree with Yves/Hamsher – though I see their point. For one thing, I can’t help but think Senate is improved just by including another non-sociopath in its ranks (bringing the total of non-sociopaths up to maybe 30).
But there is a possibility that Warren could become a repeat of 70s vintage Nader and get a lot of stuff done by advocacy totally outside of government. I’m skeptical of that though, Nader got good stuff done in a much more liberal political era, with a permanent Democratic congress. Warren’s great idea for the CFPB passed by a whisker in a brief window of Democratic supermajority that isn’t likely to reappear soon. Just on balance of probabilities, it’s more likely Warren could do more in a couple Senate terms than she could as a firebrand outsider, but exceptional people are exeptions to this and Warren may be one such.
Bobby Thomson
Shorter AuldBlackJack:
All laws should be ignored because some unrelated laws in the past were evil and ultimately abolished. Anarchy now!
Of course, that makes it awfully tough to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment or the Civil Rights Act, but you don’t care about that, anyway. You’re just making an incredibly offensive comparison because you think it gives you the moral high ground.
Are you a ratfucker or just an idiot?
slag
OK, I give up.
CornerStone–You win. (try not to let it go to your head)
ABL and Lady Jane Hamsher really are just two sides of the same wooden nickel.
FlipYrWhig
@ Tragically Flip : For one thing, there’s a distinct chance that a Senator Warren would immediately have a _Republican_ president to confront. For another, there are all kinds of criticisms aired by Senate Democrats at Democratic presidents: off the top of my head, during Obama, Feingold from the left and any number of “moderates” from the right (especially Nelson), on a range of issues; during Clinton, Sam Nunn was a huge pain in the ass over defense issues, including gays in the military. So I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to declare that Democratic senators are neutered on arrival.
Now, it’s true that seniority tends to make new senators less visible, so it’s not entirely off base to say that some people would be less effective politically by getting into institutional politics. But my larger gripe is the idea of inevitable cooption by the agenda of the president from your same party. That doesn’t ring true to me.
General Stuck
One of the dumbest things ever written on this blog.
burnspbesq
@scarshapedstar:
Do you genuinely not understand the economics of publishing professional journals, or are you being obtuse in pursuit of some bizarre agenda? Subscriptions cost what they cost because the costs of production have to be recovered out of relatively small (in some cases, extremely small) production runs. In addition, it costs money to run JSTOR, and those funds don’t magically appear out of the ass of a flock of unicorns. Somebody has to pay. If nobody pays, the resource dies, and that would be unambiguously a bad thing.
Willfully denying the existence of free-rider problems is just stupid. I had previously been of the view that you’re not stupid. I may have to reassess.
Dollared
let me help you Stuck. ABL – stupid, tribal and adds no value except as an unthinking cheerleader for her one particular issue, which is to prevent what some Obama guy said we should do: “As Roosevelt, said, make me swing to the left!”
I have never once heard her actually make a legal, policy or outcome based argument. Just nyah nyah na boo boo.
Zero.added.value.to.this.blog.
And I wouldn’t need to go there if you, Stuck, weren’t so equally tribal and fact free in your blog enforcer role.
burnspbesq
@Anya:
All crimes are, by definition, crimes against the entire population. Have you ever looked at the caption of a pleading filed in a Federal criminal case? The plaintiff is “United States of America.” Similarly in state courts: the plaintiff in California criminal cases is “People of the State of California”
We are all victims of every crime.
Bruce S
Mike Kay @ #26
I think that the Yves Smith Naked Capitalism piece Hamsher cites in that link is almost unbelievably stupid in it’s argument, but it might be helpful if you actually read it before totally mischaracterizing what “Hanoi Jane says.”
Your inference that Hamsher is impugning Warren is nonsense. The argument Smith makes at the link is remarkably weak and premised mostly on resentments against the administration and the Democratic Party, but it actually makes the argument that Warren is TOO GOOD for that Senate run, not too “impure,” and that becoming a political insider is a waste of her effectiveness as an advocate. Frankly, I wish I hadn’t taken the time to follow the link – but since I did, I don’t want to waste the fact that I actually know what was being argued, rather than making false assumptions according to pre-fabbed resentments.
Also WTF w/ “Hanoi Jane” on a liberal blog? If you don’t like alleged liberals who re-purpose right-wing slime, don’t come off like one.
Admiral_Komack
“A Harvard University fellow who was studying ethics was charged with hacking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles.”
He was studying ETHICS!
MAJOR FAIL!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Aaron Swartz IS a stupid motherfucker!
General Stuck
LOL, it’s a pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Independent Thinker. You have nothing of substance to criticize about this post, other than the fact that ABL posted it, and the fact that some bratty prog got his wings clipped for allegedly breaking the law. IOKIPDI
Trollenschlongen
This post is silly and its immature tribalism is breathtaking.
All in all, a standard ABL post.
Cheap Jim
Do Harvard fellows not have access to JSTOR through their own university libraries?
Anya
@219.burnspbesq – I know all crimes are against the “public”, this is not my issue. I have a major issues with the way ABL seems to be enjoying the threat of a possible jail term for a young man, who did a stupid anarchist crap, simply because he is linked to a major asshole like Adam Green.
I hate that weasel but the issue has nothing to do with Adam Green’s usual grifting. Why is ABL celebrating this young man’s possible jail term? I do not condone what he did, nor understand the purpose of it, to tell you the truth. He’s a decent human being whose values are aligned with mine, except this instant, so I am offended by ABL’s apparent glee at his predicament.
whetstone
Look, I think it’s possible to be of two minds about this.
1) Having academic research and/or public-domain works freely available (assuming, for the moment, that he wanted to file-share them) is a good thing.
For example, one of my friends is a non-academic writer whose first book is a work of history about the Mississippi River in the early 1800s. Google Books made it possible for him to find incredibly obscure material (which would be of little interest in its original form to the average reader) without spending years and thousands of dollars traveling from library to library, assuming he’d ever track them down at all.
My friends have e-mailed each other “grifting” JSTOR articles from college-enrolled or -employed friends, enough for me to realize that there’s a lot of valuable stuff in their archive that’s of tremendous use to people who don’t have access to it.
One parallel is the guy, can’t remember his name, who’s archiving massive amounts of court documents so you don’t have to use PACER, which is not just pricey but irritating. That’s a different animal, since they’re government documents, but (part of) the principle is the same.
2) JSTOR isn’t Google. They aren’t selling billions of dollars in advertising every year. Google is also a business, and if they want to release lots of public-domain stuff onto the internet, that’s their business, because they’ve paid to do so.
I’m a little foggy on the IP rules, but I’ve come across instances where digital copies of public domain documents are not in the public domain–the original is, but not the digital copy, because, obviously, the rights-holder paid to make the digital copy and is claiming copyright. Because they’re separate, valuable commodities (because digitizing them makes it widely accessible) that they had to pay to have made. I think that complies with the laws, and I think reasonable people can sympathize with the digitizer’s desire to recoup the costs of digitizing it and making it available.
And JSTOR is expensive for a good reason–they have to cast a wider net because if you serve academia, there’s a great obligation to archive stuff 99.9% of readers wouldn’t care about. Someone upthread said “oh, JSTOR is soooo boring,” and sure, an obscure journal article might seem boring if you don’t care about the topic, but in the hands of a good academic, it can become something really important*. Maybe it’s just one obscure fact or idea, but if you’ve ever written anything of an academic nature, sometimes that’s just what you need.
And casting a net that wide, for the benefit of a comparative few, is very expensive.
That’s why I find this post offensively shallow. As someone who creates content for a living, and who’s had to deal with content poachers, I don’t agree with what Swartz is alleged to have done. (If Swartz instead wanted everything JSTOR had to do some kind of automated research, that’s a different thing, but he still shouldn’t have done it in the way he did.)
But: I understand why he did it. I understand why people are defending him. Just pointing at it and saying–“hyuck, grifter” is pointless, and I don’t see how his political ties bear on the story in any but the most tangential way.
I mean, sure: if you don’t believe point 1 at all, feel free to pound him for being an information anarchist who tried to steal others’ hard work. But because he’s somehow related to some fairly obscure political group? Please.
Oh, and also: did ABL post whole AP story to be ironic? And ABL fans who are yelling at everyone who thinks this post is bad, do you understand why we think so now?
*Edit: Which is not to say an obscure journal article about, say, some obscure point of American realist literature isn’t really important in its own right even if only a handful of English profs care. But one of them can take it and turn it into something of wider import. I guarantee you, if you’ve ever read any really good historical work, it’s supported in part by the work of academics you haven’t heard of doing laborious research for a tiny audience.
aimai
What Whetstone said. I try to stay off these ABL posts because even when I enjoy the original post, and am informed by it, the threads quickly degenerate into a pro or con position vis a vis ABL. I like ABL’s posts, I’m often informed by them, but this one seems bizarre and both meanspirited and just plain weird. Personally, I like the PCCC (to a certain extent) and I think they are actually trying to leverage a lot of talent (in making ads) with not very much money to help local novice politicians run successful campaigns. They don’t support the President as much as I’d like to see them do so. On the other hand, the Obama campaign (s) since the first one have made it very clear that they don’t want to work more closely with progressives on the ground. They don’t ask, or want, for grassroots organizing help, phone calls, or small dollar donations for local fights. They also don’t liase with local groups very much. Maybe that’s an artifact of the distance that needs to be kept between a sitting president and his base but for whatever reason the PCCC is working almost entirely locally in order to create a better House. That’s meritorious work. I don’t get the bitchiness and the accusations of grifting.
aimai
gwangung
Same here. Does a disservice to the blog and to the subject matter.
whetstone
there’s a lot of valuable stuff in their archive that’s of tremendous use to people who don’t have access to it
Apologies, this is wrong; I should have been clear. Anyone with a computer has access to it, but it’s expensive. You can also IRL JSTOR stuff, but there’s a time cost and sometimes a monetary cost.
AuldBlackJack
@ ‘Booby’ Thompson
Out of your own mouth. I have nothing to add except that you are proof once again that Life, the Universe and Everything is very simple when you are a simpleton.
Comrade Kevin
I find it interesting that the words “tribal” and “tribalism” only ever come up when discussing ABL posts. I wonder why that is.
stuck working
I realize that this thread is dead, but @whetstone, the guy you referred to who helped put PACER docs in the public doman was the very same Aaron Swartz being discussed.
stuck working
I realize that this thread is dead, but @whetstone, the guy you referred to who helped put PACER docs in the public doman was the very same Aaron Swartz being discussed.
whetstone
@stuck working
Yeah, just read that Swartz pulled a similar stunt with PACER; thanks for the update. I was thinking of a different guy (who took a different approach), Carl Malamud.
Corner Stone
@Steeplejack:
I’m thinking about doing a little Queensryche oeuvre tonight if you wanna stop by.
Neil Bates
The most important issue here: the right of the “injured party” to decide whether they were “injured” and want to press charges. Apparently they don’t, so that *should* be the end of it.
Pinacacci
I gotta say, my Uni doesn’t pay for JSTOR and it’s astounding the number of research articles I need that are old enough to be archived there. My uni probably pays more money in inter-library loan costs annually than it would cost them to subscribe to JSTOR. I am just unethical enough that I would certainly have tapped that guy’s goldmine of research articles that I couldn’t get without paying more than I can spare. Just to bring it back to the original topic.
The Raven
Cornerstone, “That JSTOR is not calling for the guillotine”
They aren’t. They’ve settled. A prosecutor is calling for a criminal trial, apparently for his own reasons.
Farrell wrote, “There is a lot of messy debate here that is ready to explode,” and here it is, right here in these comments.