JSTOR Liberator sets public domain academic articles free

"By running the script ... a public domain academic article is downloaded to the user’s computer, then uploaded back to ArchiveTeam in a small act of protest against JSTOR's restrictive policies." -- Ars<p>"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<p>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.

I am trying to collect small hacks like this that are popping up. I know everyone writes scrapers, but hardly anyone talks about it. But maybe talking about it would be helpful so that we can figure out what goes right and what goes wrong:<p><a href="https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front</a><p>Someone contributed a small greasemonkey script that does something similar to the JSTOR memorial liberator, except for SpringerLink previews.<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/4535401" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/4535401</a>

Just because something is in public domain doesn't mean it's free. Shakespear's works might be public domain but there is a cost to printing a book. There is a cost to scanning pages, there is a cost to hosting a website, administering a website etc.<p>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.

Unfortunately, I can see this pounding JSTOR's site. I'm sure US Attorney Carmen Ortiz will think this is a DDoS attack because JSTOR can't handle the traffic generated by everyone going there.<p>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?

I might be missing something, but how are the articles being liberated? I don't see any downloadable articles at archiveteam.org at all. Is the idea that they're going to be made available as a torrent or in some other downloadable form at a later date?

I feel kind of hollowish about this - I'd wondered at the time why Aaron chose such a direct method that was sure to piss off some people and get him burnt in some way. But everybody's got their own methods and goals, and he succeeded at the social goal of rallying people to his cause (something a purely technical solution has a very hard time doing). But now seeing an implementation of a tool that would liberate the same articles, a bit slower, but without him having to pay the ultimate price? Sigh.

I think it's entirely appropriate for those of us who have just learned of JSTOR to go visit it and check out the site. It's interesting because they allow you to download a single article for free.<p>Once I download the public domain article from 1886, I suppose I could do whatever I wanted with it.

So all it takes is a famous person killing themselves over prosecution and an insanely massive outcry from the internet. Seems easy enough. /s

the beauty is its only the beginning.

its a hack