The THIEF WHO STOLE KNOWLEDGE

by Leigh Lundin

Imagine a world where a cartel wants to publish your work, which may receive worldwide distribution and be archived for centuries. They may not pay a lot; they may not pay at all. They might charge you a nominal fee to cover expenses.

But this is a prestigious publishing group. Like the ancient Library of Alexandria, they collected wisdom of the centuries, perhaps a cure for cancer, the secret of interstellar flight, or a translation of a pre-Biblical codex. Perhaps they published your mother or your great-grandfather and perhaps they published his great-grandfather. That’s not impossible– they house treatises dating from the 1600s.

If you don’t have an elite cartel library card and you want a copy of your own work, they’ll charge you $5, or $15, or more. You might desire they make your works publicly available for nothing, but they won’t. Alternatively, you might want to monetize that brilliant college thesis. That can’t happen. You may wish to independently republish your article. Nope, can’t do that either (except portions in ‘collected works’).

For the Good of Mankind

Surprisingly, this cartel is based upon the assumption that its members are supposed to educate and serve the public good, but in fact, the cartel makes a fine living hiding information and thwarting the unwashed public who might like to access it, sometimes members of the public who can little afford it.

The cartel could reasonably have based its business model on Project Gutenberg or Open Library, Google or Wikipedia, making information freely available, but why give wisdom away when you can make money secreting it and extort interested parties a thousand pennies at a time?

Robin Hood

Suppose an intellectual adventurer grows disgusted at this abrogation of public trust. He obtains one of the elite’s library cards. He begins to check out articles… five million articles. He doesn’t ‘steal’ them from the shelves, but he copies them presumably with an eye to making them freely available to one and all, rich and poor.

Mr. Swartz engaged in a certain amount of techie cat ‘n’ mouse with JSTOR and then MIT. Each time JSTOR blocked Swartz’s IP address, he bumped it by 1. At some point, JSTOR blocked an entire range of IP addresses, cutting off customers and shooting themselves in the financial foot. (Presumably government prosecutors blame this ‘outage’ on Swartz in their indictment.) MIT acted a little smarter, blocking Swartz’s MAC address (internal computer serial number), but again Swartz responded by spoofing a new MAC bumped by 1.

The cartel doesn’t like that. It calls the Sheriff of Nottingham and claims he’s stolen… er, excessively borrowed five million documents with the intent of sharing them, even though large numbers of these documents are public domain or might have other fair use waivers. The cartel demands authorities seize these works he stole, er, borrowed and fine him $1-million and toss him in prison for 35 years to teach freedom-loving cartel-haters a lesson. The prosecutor can’t figure out which legal theory applies, but they jail him just because.

Putting the Cartel Before the Hoarse

This cartel, which we’ll call JSTOR, and its prominent member, MIT, did exactly that to a Harvard fellow named Aaron Swartz. As closely as I make out, Mr. Swartz is a believer in freedom of knowledge and intellect… you know, the thing MIT and other universities are supposed to take seriously. MIT, like most publishers of academic journals, acts as a minion of this cartel, JSTOR. Indeed, apparently JSTOR threatened to terminate MIT’s access to the archives MIT contributes to.

Former Princeton University president William Bowen founded JSTOR (‘journal storage’) with good intentions. Rather than schools and libraries storing their own copies of journals (some obscure, some rare), JSTOR proposed outsourcing that part of the library in stored digital form. A benefit would be increased availability and searchability. For a fee.

But then JSTOR discovered something– in many cases they’d placed under lock and key the only source of certain documents, which made them very valuable indeed. And they owned the only key.

Who’s Minding the JSTOR?

They started in 1995 with seven libraries. Sixteen years later, 7000 libraries find themselves members. That’s a success story by most standards except for one minor point. These works of the ages are not freely available to mankind. That’s what Aaron Swartz protested by wishing to place public domain (and non-public domain) articles in the, well, public domain.

If he’d sabotaged the facility, he wouldn’t be threatened with 35 years or a $1,000,000 fine, prosecutorial over-reacting. Because he dared protest a unilateral decision made by those who financially benefit from the brains, sweat, and tears of the most intelligent authors on the planet, Mr. Swartz is considered worse than a violent criminal because he thwarted the intellectual establishment. JSTOR and MIT disingenuously claim they consider the matter closed– except it isn’t closed for Mr. Swartz.

Freeing Free Knowledge

I have great sympathy for Mr. Swartz. I research historical and technical information for my writing, but I can’t tell you how many times I hit a JSTOR brick wall or ‘paywall‘ as it’s called, cutting off that avenue of research– sometimes the only avenue of research.

I discussed this with my local library, which isn’t a JSTOR member, and with our resident librarian, Rob, who is. With JSTOR (and similar archival services), I can pay for individual articles, subscribe for a period of time (up to tens of thousands of dollars if I’m big and rich enough), or bribe pay a JSTOR member institution to let me peek at the goodies.

Publish, not Prosper

From an economic standpoint, it’s a losing proposition for the individual going it alone. Say I want to write an article on the Piltdown Man scandal. Using Google, I zero in on articles found in JSTOR finding The Man of Piltdown by George Grant MacCurdy, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Apr-Jun, 1914), pp. 331-336, price $12.

$12 for an article from a dead author that fell out of copyright long ago? Does a dead or living author or his family reap any part of my $12? No.

If I want to research a dozen articles, that’s $144 or more and I have no guarantee any of the articles might serve my needs. If I sell my resulting manuscript, I might be paid as little as $150 or nothing at all if I contribute it to certain blog or encyclopedia sites.

The Dutch Masters Brain Trust

In graduate school, a professor persuaded me to write a paper on a computer data structure technique to be published by Elsevier. As I recall, Elsevier rewarded authors with a discount to their journal. I looked up author benefits, considerably less than some vanity presses although Elsevier now offers free ‘e-prints’ as long as you don’t try to make money off your own article. Among the ‘rights’ (Elsevier’s rights, not yours) is this verbiage:

Authors of Elsevier-published articles may use them only for scholarly purposes as set out above and may not use or post them for commercial purposes or under policies or other mechanisms designed to aggregate and openly disseminate manuscripts or articles or to substitute for journal-provided services. This includes the use or posting of articles for commercial gain…

In other words, they can make money off it but authors can’t. They retain more crucial rights to the article than their contributors.

Robin the JSTOR

In protest of Swartz’s arrest, academic activist Greg Maxwell published an archive of 18,592 public domain articles from JSTOR’s Royal Society collection on the file-sharing site Pirate Bay. He says, "I find a lot of my interests land at the intersection of technology and public policy," which is why he’s often found on Wikipedia and Wikimedia, the organization that shares knowledge, not hides it.