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A user called Greg Maxwell just uploaded a torrent with 18,592 scientific publications to the Pirate Bay, in what appears to be a protest directed both at the recent indictment of programmer Aaron Swartz for data theft as well as the scientific publishing model in general. All the documents of the 32-gigabyte torrent were taken from JSTOR, the academic database that’s at the center of the case against Swartz.
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Maxwell goes on to explain that he initially planned to upload the documents to Wikipedia. But then he looked into the legality of the situation and realized that he could get sued by publishers who’d claim that merely scanning the documents or adding a watermark gave them new copyright protections. “They might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws,†he explains — which is exactly what seems to have happened to Swartz.
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Maxwell goes on to explain that he initially planned to upload the documents to Wikipedia. But then he looked into the legality of the situation and realized that he could get sued by publishers who’d claim that merely scanning the documents or adding a watermark gave them new copyright protections. “They might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws,†he explains — which is exactly what seems to have happened to Swartz.
It's an interesting case. Quite a lot of the research is funded by the publics of various countries, yet none of the fees charged go towards more research.