"At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content." -- JSTOR
The contention that JSTOR is acting as a faithful steward of public domain works -- having established any sort of restriction or barrier to prevent the public from accessing those works -- truly examines the widths and depths and bounds of intellectual dishonesty.
JSTOR's non-public-domain works are a different story, but the journals are the most to blame for that; JSTOR is just a licensee. Pretty similar to Google Books in that case, too (Google will only let you see a "restricted preview" or "snippet view", depending on the work, because they don't own the copyright).
Indeed, every time I see a publisher offering me an article from the 1920s or 1930s as a digital download for a small fee of around, oh, say, $30, my heart is filled with contempt for this attempt of milking every last cent out of every paper.
Isn't it better for a non-profit entity to digitize PD articles and make them available to the world at a reasonable price? Or would you prefer a world where JSTOR didn't exist and the only people who had access to most old PD documents where those who lived in major western cities near the biggest libraries?
1) Some of the articles on JSTOR are the product of complete public funding. But many are not. Many are the result of partial or complete university funding.
2) All the work of editing the underlying journals, which is very time consuming, is generally not publicly funded.
3) All of the work of digitizing those journal articles is not free. When Google undertakes to digitize such content, they charge you by selling your privacy to others. JSTOR just asks you to pay a fee for their service. Who is the bad guy here?
Here we are, nearly 40 years later, standing next to Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and all the open source software in the world, and we can say, Yes, people will do this work for free. The fundamental premises of your argument (that people won't do it for free) has been disproved.
Let's see..
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1831029
The "rights and permissions" link goes out to:
https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?author=Fischer...
... ok copyright.com is not encouraging at all, that scam is everywhere. Let's try something older.
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30096268
The "rights and permissions" link goes out to:
https://www.copyright.com/openurl.do?sid=pd_ITHAKA&servi...
which leads to:
http://www.copyright.com/search.do?operation=detail&item...
.. where they seem to be selling the rights??
As I see it, they've removed the majority of the barrier (i.e. actually tracking down a copy of the periodical or whatever). So you have to log in and deal with a watermark- calling that 'intellectual dishonesty' is stretching the term to its limits.
I'm sure she can rationalize that as a terrorist attack on essential infrastructure, so let's round it up to 170 years in jail for the conspirators. Let's assume every one of those connections would have paid $200 for an article,so that's $50 million in damages. Right?
At this point, I don't think it would be a stretch to see an overreaction, even if it's just benign traffic from people checking out the free content melt the servers.
EDIT: Apparently the TOS (not EULA) is vague enough that this might actually violate the TOS- but the creators are very explicit about this and clearly tell the user that if they violate the TOS it's their own damn fault. The only thing I could think of is that the creators could be hit with DMCA violations for circumventing the 'DRM' of the site, EVEN if they never actually use it on anything copyrighted.
And you don't think that she will think that this is hacking if the site goes down from the load? Besides, making an example of people is having it out for them.
The response time on an example PDF for me was around 10 seconds.
Once I download the public domain article from 1886, I suppose I could do whatever I wanted with it.
Is scanning old journals a creative process? Maybe there is some case law that says so, but until I see that, I am inclined to say no, and everything that I can find agrees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right#United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#Reprod...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_....
If JSTOR has a different opinion, they can see me in court.
https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front
Someone contributed a small greasemonkey script that does something similar to the JSTOR memorial liberator, except for SpringerLink previews.
How hard is this logic to understand? If you don't want to use JSTOR don't use it. Don't go around saying they should let you download it for free.
Just because someone is selling something that is public domain doesn't mean that you can't give it away for free.
So it's not as if JSTOR suddenly saw the light of day and opened up their archive for download.
