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0 pointspolitician13y ago0 comments

We agree that to operate a business one needs revenues. We agree that sales of non-public-domain works and value-added services are appropriate avenues for improving revenues.

Where we differ in opinion seems to be that I do not believe that a company can take a public domain work, wave a magic terms of service, and then sell it back to the public.

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res0nat0r13y ago· 2 in thread

This actually happens all of the time, see the copies of Shakespeare and Beethoven on sale at your local bookstore. The content is being repackaged and sold, but that doesn't negate the fact that the works are still available for free somewhere else because they are public domain.

politicianOP13y ago

I'm not doing a particularly good job of pinning you down, but look, my complaint is that regardless of the availability of particular individual public domain works JSTOR's TOS contains language preventing the coordinated download of the entire public domain archive, and will block your MAC address if you try to download too much of the public's works.

res0nat0r13y ago

Correct. Downloading their entire archive and putting it online somewhere else puts their business at risk and will prevent them from recouping costs they've invested and asked users to pay for (by legally signing up for an account and paying them). Just because it is public domain doesn't mean it can be taken and posted elsewhere.

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