Copywrong

Just noticed this in a letter to the editor from last week's New Yorker:

Swartz was apparently familiar with laws protecting proprietary-information-management systems, so he should not have been surprised by the severity of the prosecution’s response to his crime. It is a crime, and not a victimless one. I am a retired journalist; during my working years, my salary depended, and today my pension relies, on people paying for copyrighted content. In recent years, as the business that supports journalism has declined, thousands of journalists have lost pay, benefits, and, ultimately, their jobs. Some people may consider illegally downloading content from the “1942 edition of the Journal of Botany” to be benign, but downloading periodicals such as the New York Times—or The New Yorker, for that matter—without paying for them would harm the people who worked for those publications in the past and who write for them today. 

The ignorant cruelty of that is up there with Byron's savage dismissal of Keats's death—

'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuff'd out by an article.

 —which I'm sure he would have regretted if he had understood what he was talking about. In particular the writer does not seem to know, and Larissa Macfarquhar's [jump]
original article did not explain, the nature of the database that Aaron Swartz got busted for hacking into, which makes a big difference.

Google Doodle for the 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges.

Jstor is an online aggregation of articles from academic journals—Journal of Botany yes, Times and New Yorker no. The authors are not journalists, or not wearing their journalist hats, and are not paid for their contributions. Very few, vanishingly few, could attract an audience of a size that would justify paying them, and those who can can always choose to publish in a more visible place and take a fee. For the most part, they are writing for glory (the acclaim of peers, perhaps the same four or five people who have seen the piece in manuscript) and tenure.

The tenure part is absolutely real, and works on two levels: first, the more publications you have, and the more prestigious their venues are, the more your employer wants you; second, the more other scholars quote you in their own articles, the higher your value goes.

Jstor performs an immense service to academic authors and readers. Although the journals don't pay writers or editors for their work, they are nevertheless extremely—one might say incredibly—expensive, hundreds and even thousands of dollars for an annual subscription (partly because their print runs are so tiny, so that they get no economies of scale, but I believe the publishers, like textbook publishers, are abusive). Individuals don't even think of subscribing (you can get a deal for those issued by membership societies by joining, but otherwise forget it) and it can be a challenge for libraries as well, in these days of promiscuous budget cutting. Jstor and similar services are not cheap by any means either, but they make vast amounts of material available, including things your library can't possibly afford.

But they're only accessible through a library; from inside the building in the case of a normal public library, or through your online account if you are affiliated as student or faculty member with a university library, or for that matter a high school library (my 16-year-old son has access through his school, not that he would dream of being such a herb as to use it). It's not even clear what Swartz meant to do with the articles he downloaded, but (as Jstor itself concluded, a little too late) he certainly wasn't doing any harm to anybody, and MIT's reaction was crazy and sick.

Images in this post are from a Tumblr Library of Babel query page.