RANT: Anyone here interested in the underlying issue of academic publishing? To me, the very notion that publicly (or privately for that matter) funded academic research gets locked behind paywalls of organizations that have not contributed financially to the research endeavor published, seems like irony to me. In short, they pay not a single dime to produce the content, charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published, publish the content and make money off of the subscription they sell, and sue the hell out of anyone who tries to wrestle it back out of their control.
Just FYI, this is often a prosecutorial bargaining tactic for dealing with an uncooperative defendant (based on personal experience, anyway).<p>That said, I wish articles like this one would quit making the rounds. It's macabre theater and isn't doing aaronsw any favors.
EDIT:Make my point more clear<p>Edited comment:<p>It seems to me that Federal law is able to be applied to websites created by private individuals or businesses. As long as the ToS has knowingly been broken and the person doing the breaking has benefited materially then he is at risk of federal prosecution. I don't see a lot of comment about reasonable the ToS has to be. This just strikes as being completely irrational.<p>Original comment:<p>Riiiigght, so I can put together a website with some strange terms of service and then the FBI will come arrest anyone breaking those terms of service because it is a federal crime.<p>Just what planet do these guys live on....
This could be very troubling for scrapers, as they frequently breach the terms of service. If successfully prosecuted it would encourage and empower sites with content that get scraped to push for criminal charges and win given this precedence.
Remember the FREE KEVIN bumper stickers?<p>FREE AARON.<p>Just to elaborate... what it seems we have here is a brilliant engineer and idealist leftie that lost his grip on what is reasonable. He seriously fucked up, and then he seriously fucked up by getting caught. He isn't a hardened criminal, he wasn't stealing to make money and he can almost certainly be reformed with a light sentence, community service and probation.<p>Only the oppositional system doesn't see things that way.