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Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica)Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica)Posted Jan 14, 2013 22:54 UTC (Mon) by burki99 (subscriber, #17149)In reply to: Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica) by gmaxwell Parent article: Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica)
The Government is one part of the story and it is hard to speculate about the exact motives of the prosecutor. But the other part is JSTOR and they did react in multiple ways since the incidence in 2011: First they settled any civil claims they might have had against Aaron in June 2011 (http://about.jstor.org/statement-swartz) and they started a Register and Read programme a short while ago. This offer - while not giving everything to everybody for free - will in effect give most people access the many works without any costs (http://about.jstor.org/rr). So I don't feel it is correct to write that "[t]o the millions of people outside the ivory halls of academic these works remain unavailable." The story is sad enough as it is. But the world of academic publishing - at least in the humanities - seems to be turning slowly towards the direction he envisioned, even if it may seem much to slowly to everyone who shares his ideals.
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Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica) Posted Jan 14, 2013 23:25 UTC (Mon) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]
Indeed there is progress— but please take care to not overstate it: You're talking about a _brand new_ program allows page-at-a-time access to works which are five years old and older, only in a subset of journals, only under a draconian terms of service, and subject to a substantial and easily hit rate-limit. You could, though somewhat uncharitably, call this a sales technique more than a real improvement to access. Though it is a real improvement, if a disappointing one.
Allowing the industry to move at its convince and by its own terms— if it even moves at all— is the kind of opportunity afforded by such harshness in the interest of preserving prohibitions which would otherwise be so easily eroded because of their fragility and obvious, to many, wrongness for society.
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