Reddit co-founder and Demand Progress director arrested.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20080754-261/report-reddit-cofounder-arrested-for-data-theft/

  Quote

Aaron Swartz, one of the co-founders of social news site Reddit, was arrested in Boston today and is accused of stealing four million documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JSTOR, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers, The New York Times is reporting.

Schwartz, 24, also founded the nonprofit group Demand Progress, a group with a stated mission of changing public policy that the group believes negatively impacts the Internet. According to Demand Progress' Web site, one of the issues it is against is the Protect IP Act.

Protect IP is a bill that Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judicial Committee introduced this year that is designed to speed up the process of blocking access to suspected pirate sites in the United States here and broad.

According to the Times, the charges filed against Mr. Swartz include wire fraud, computer fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer and criminal forfeiture.

Apparently, the companies he supposedly "defrauded" said no harm was done and did not press any charges. So he's pretty much in trouble for reading JSTOR stuff at the library.

What the fuck is this?

There's a petition here:

http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/support_aaron/

He did more than that.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/reddit-co-founder-charged-with-data-theft/

  Quote

Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old programmer and online political activist, was indicted Tuesday in Boston on charges that he stole more than four million documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JSTOR, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers.

And fromJSTOR

  Quote

Last fall and winter, JSTOR experienced a significant misuse of our database. A substantial portion of our publisher partners’ content was downloaded in an unauthorized fashion using the network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of our participating institutions. The content taken was systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems.

Over 4 million books/articles etc.

Who knows why, or if it was him.. We'll see how the case builds

edit: BTW, he is also the founder/director of demandprogresss too

Ah okay so he apparently took 4 million JSTOR articles from a computer he wasn't supposed to access in the first place.

But still, that's not theft, at all. The prosecutor said “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars," which is just utterly absurd and completely devoid of logic. The people who run JSTOR said no harm, no foul, but obviously he's pissed some people off, because the gov't is still pressing charges.

edit: what timing! i still think it's quite ludicrous, considering what they're trying to charge him with.

lol jstor is awesome

lets turn this into a jstor thread, come on guys. we can do this!

did you know jstor has an iphone app? THERES AN APP FOR THAT

and holy shit JSTOR MERCH

jstor.

agreed, jstor is awesome. so much knowledge up in that bish

more of an artstor fan but that's just my area of expertise, really.

http://www.artstor.org/index.shtml

guyz all da stors are gud

so is jstor still school/library only? in the past there was shit i want to read on there, but i couldn't get at it!! i had to write a relative that could get to it. if it's still like that, then i totally understand why someone would want to rip it all off and whack it on TPB for "the good of the people" etc.

  On 7/20/2011 at 1:13 AM, hahathhat said:

so is jstor still school/library only? in the past there was shit i want to read on there, but i couldn't get at it!! i had to write a relative that could get to it. if it's still like that, then i totally understand why someone would want to rip it all off and whack it on TPB for "the good of the people" etc.

You can get at it if you want to pay for it

edit: http://support.jstor.org/csp/PriceCalculator/

there's a torrent of it doing the rounds now.

  On 7/20/2011 at 1:35 AM, hautlle said:

  On 7/20/2011 at 1:13 AM, hahathhat said:

so is jstor still school/library only? in the past there was shit i want to read on there, but i couldn't get at it!! i had to write a relative that could get to it. if it's still like that, then i totally understand why someone would want to rip it all off and whack it on TPB for "the good of the people" etc.

 

 

You can get at it if you want to pay for it

 

edit: http://support.jstor.org/csp/PriceCalculator/

yeah, see, this is what i mean. i just want the full-text of an article every now and then, a la carte. i don't want to "subscribe" to individual journals for hundreds apiece. i'd pay per article if it's cash they want, but it's simply not an option!! your options are to go to a library that has it (my local didn't, last i checked) or bug someone you know who's still in school.

so fuck those subscribe-only tightwads. hope someone steals an updated batch six months from now, too.

if anyone wants individual articles, just ask nicely.

yeah, same offer. I have a year left before I graduate, then a year of student teaching and graduate level courses. PM me :sup:

...anyone got artstor access? :D

this thread is cool because I understand nothing in it.

if I'm looking for something and I find it hosted at JSTOR I don't bother looking at it because I know it must be out of date. If you're studying you should have access to current publications in your field or else your school is screwing you over

Err whilst jstor is certainly only one of the many sources I have access to, not all the journals archived at jstor are out of date. For example, one of my majors is Asian Studies - there are currently 59 journals on Asian Studies hosted there and 5 of them are current to last year. Remember, this is academia, and sure being current is nice, but it's not always necessary, with the exception being if you are doing cutting edge research. But really, how many people are doing cutting edge research?

  On 7/25/2011 at 1:38 PM, chenGOD said:

Err whilst jstor is certainly only one of the many sources I have access to, not all the journals archived at jstor are out of date. For example, one of my majors is Asian Studies - there are currently 59 journals on Asian Studies hosted there and 5 of them are current to last year. Remember, this is academia, and sure being current is nice, but it's not always necessary, with the exception being if you are doing cutting edge research. But really, how many people are doing cutting edge research?

I am. But you're right really x

:sup:

  On 7/19/2011 at 9:40 PM, KY said:

and holy shit JSTOR MERCH

Awesome. Just bought one.