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@georgia

In 2019, JSTOR’s revenue was $79 million.
you can’t tell me it takes $79 million a year to operate a digital library with a mere 12 million journal articles

@mia @georgia And JSTOR has likely much less downloads-per-article than an open-access archive like arXiv (2.4M articles, 4M of revenue cf https://info.arxiv.org/about/reports/index.html ).

@lanodan @mia @georgia put it on bittorrent

@sun @lanodan @mia @georgia nobody wants to go through the effort of downloading a torrent for a maybe 4MB PDF, unfortunately the stuff is just a bit too small and torrents have a bit too much friction at the moment for that.

@georgia What’s the J stand for?

@Turdicus @georgia What does JSTOR stand for?
Journal Storage
JSTOR” stands for “Journal Storage" and is a protected electronic archive of leading journals across many academic disciplines. It provides text-searchable, high-quality . pdf facsimiles of each journal article from a publication's inception up to the past 3-5 years.Dec 18, 2023

@RaHoWaJoe @georgia I already decided that it stands for “jew” so I’m not interested in the truth any longer

@Turdicus @georgia That's fine

@RaHoWaJoe @georgia I’m glad I know the truth though

@georgia he didn't even share them he just downloaded them

Thats what you call the final stages of capitalism

@georgia This is the kind of hero we need. #martyr

@cassidyclown didn't he put them on scihub?

@georgia iirc he didn't get the chance to share them, he was just downloading them using his uni's guest account. He had written a manifesto about freedom of information years before which they used as evidence that his intent was to share (it probably was).

But all he actually did was download pdfs using MIT's guest account from an unlocked wiring closet. They wanted 35 years in prison for this.

@cassidyclown @georgia watch the internet's own boy

@cassidyclown @georgia he was downloading so rapidly that it was breaking their system and they took technical means to block him repeatedly, which he circumvented. when he couldn't circumvent them anymore he installed a device on MIT's network. He got such a big sentence because they overcharged him, but also because he didn't accept their plea bargain because he was trying to make a point about his innocence. He should have since he was guilty.

The bad guys here are: The Obama Justice Dept which was directing the severe punishment from behind the scenes, and whose attorney managing it framed the prosecution in blatantly incorrect way, such as suggesting breaking and entering and framing it as "stealing" (neither are relevant to the case as he neither broke into the closet nor stole anything.)

To a lesser extent JSTOR: who alleges they didn't even want the criminal prosecution to happen and intended to file no civil charges (this could be a lie) but ultimately, this happened because they insist that they need to charge ridiculously exorbitant fees to host free data.

To a degree Aaron Swartz: responsible for his own circumstances, if he just rate-limited his fucking script none of this would have happened.

My analysis.

@sun @cassidyclown @georgia yeah downloading so fast it breaking servers is bad

@cassidyclown @georgia Possession with intent to distribute

@sun @cassidyclown @georgia
emails seem indicate there was limiter supposed to catch and block anyone downloading 300+ pdfs. getting around that required creating new sessions, which they caught and added a limit on as well (after 4 days

@sun @cassidyclown @georgia
and jstor rep, informed of situation, first replies like this
2024-1715649702.png

@ageha @cassidyclown @georgia yeah I figured their public statement was not true.

@sun @cassidyclown @georgia
understanding here was that they started the whole thing off with law enforcement. then later, seeing it was going to be bad publicity, tried to back out, but at that point government wanted to "make an example of cybercrime" kinda situation

@ageha @cassidyclown @georgia asking the us government for something is like a monkey paw scenario

@ignaloidas @georgia @lanodan @mia @sun you can download individual files from BitTorrent

@shrimp @mia @georgia @ignaloidas @sun Which doesn't really solves anything, in fact if you toggle on a file after the other(s) long finished downloading, the slowness of BitTorrent still hits you.

It's the kind of case where a mirror network similarly to what's done with distros makes more sense.

@ageha @cassidyclown @georgia @sun Kind of reason why I really want platforms like arXiv/HAL/… but also Sci-Hub to eat their lunch.
Scientific publications aren't some kind of trade or military secret, because if they would, you'd have serious issues (universities typically being open access or very close to).

@lanodan @cassidyclown @georgia @ageha "our collection is PRECIOUS and VALUABLE and is the product of all our hard work of being A PLACE THAT EVERYONE JUST MAILS A PDF TO"

@lanodan @cassidyclown @georgia @sun @ageha
> have police break in and steal hard drives of public research data
counter offer: an extremely painful death for publishing vultures

@lanodan @ageha @cassidyclown @georgia I'm exaggerating a little they do more than that but nothing that justifies their extreme expense and protectiveness of their scheme

@sun @cassidyclown @georgia @ageha Yeah, they typically do a bit more than like archive.org or a random FTP site (not sure for JSTOR but some publications hosters have quite neat tagging, plus full-text search at scale).

But it's a bit like if something like if a somewhat commercial software repository were offended by someone making a mirror (meanwhile I think sourceforge, which is corpo-backed, still has few other organisations including corporations hosting official mirrors).

@lanodan @cassidyclown @georgia @sun @ageha publishers are professional parasites the fucked up scheme of convincing everyone to sell them product as some form of honor currency in academia so they can charge the universities to sell them back access to their own work product is all they have

they gotta protect it cause without rent seeking they are nothing

@ageha @cassidyclown @georgia @sun I seem to remember some story about how a jew-backed company bought up many academic journals and exploited them. @MelGibsonafter4Beers do you know the details?