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Comment by miles | Hacker News Reader

if what the government alleged was true — and I say “if” because I am not revealing what Aaron said to me then — then what he did was wrong. And if not legally wrong, then at least morally wrong.

Morally wrong to download taxpayer-funded research? I'm sorry Larry, you lost me.

More on the academic publishing "industry": http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/22/academic-pu...

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> Morally wrong to download taxpayer-funded research? I'm sorry Larry, you lost me.

Then you've got a pretty significant misunderstanding of Larry, especially as he clarifies what he found morally wrong in the next phrases of the paragraph:

> The causes that Aaron fought for are my causes too. But as much as I respect those who disagree with me about this, these means are not mine.

Larry's saying that we should fight against unjust laws in court and ride in the back of the bus on the way to the court house.

I was wondering if this sentence was a typo. I thought he almost certainly meant the reverse:

And if not morally wrong, then at least legally wrong.

What Lessig sees as the moral problem may not be the retrieval itself but the use of resources. I dunno, I'm just guessing.

Taxpayers fund my research, so can they just break in and steal "information" (code, plots, draft of papers, etc)? They paid for it, right? The academic publishing industry is not one of my favorites, but they do provide a service to the communities they represent. Circumventing them will eventually destroy the community unless another "open" organization is willing to step in. Many fields (mine included) are so arcane that very few would be interested in making an open publishing venue with the editorial quality we have now.

"Stealing" in the sense of depriving you access to the documents should be prohibited, but I see no problem if someone requested you immediately copy all of your research.

In fact this is exactly the case with anyone working directly for the federal government, doing research or otherwise. You're told in no uncertain terms that at any moment information on your work laptop can be FOIA'd in which case you will have to immediately hand over the contents of your hard drive (if it has been determined there is a reasonable likelihood that it contains the FOIA'd information). Obviously if you're working on classified state secrets the process is different (also personal information is redacted from the documents). There's no reason research can't be accomplished successfully given the condition that the public has a right to that information at any given moment.

> I see no problem if someone requested you immediately copy all of your research.

Academia can be extremely competitive. Like, if a competing lab got ahold even of the title of your upcoming paper, they would and do rush to duplicate your results, and try to publish before you to get the scoop.

For that reason, I don't know if open access to everyone's hard drives would work.

Perhaps it should be more cooperative.

I'd say "too bad" for slow researchers. If someone can reproduce your results and publish a quality paper before you, that is better for society.

Nobody gets to "own" an idea. This possessiveness and reputational greed is what is causing all of these problems.

In my experience as a researcher, this competitiveness and haste to publish leads very frequently to lower quality in the research. For a researcher's career is often more profitable to quickly publish a half-baked paper than ensuring that everything is correct and well explained. This is a quite difficult problem to solve.

The question here would be why should the public have to break in in the first place? Why isn't it public info from the start?

Agreed. Many times publicly funded projects are not entirely open, case in point: DoD funded work.

> Taxpayers fund my research, so can they just break in and steal "information" (code, plots, draft of papers, etc).

They should be allowed to make copies of it (in which case it isn't theft). They should not be allowed to deprive you of your copies of the information.

I don't mean this as an attack, but I think you're missing the point. First, I doubt you publish significant amounts of code in any published papers. I've read a number of Physics papers and I don't think I've seen more than two lines of code in them. Plots are a different matter, but they'll be highly visible if a paper gains any traction at all.

Second, the taxpayers did fund your research (assuming you research at a university), even if you had to work for that funding, and the results should be publicly available as default. Or can you provide a reason for why it shouldn't?

Personally, I'm biased even without the taxpayer argument since I believe in online learning (duolingo, OCW, etc.). I also know most published papers will only be skimmed at some later date by people highly involved in that field, and so having the information available to interested taxpayers doesn't seem to me to be an issue.

It does not follow that the destruction of the academic publishing industry will destroy the scientific community.

> Many fields (mine included) are so arcane that very few would be interested in making an open publishing venue with the editorial quality we have now.

What is your field? And why don't the members of this field just create their own on-line publishing venue?

Taxpayers don't fund government, workers fund government (and it's expenditures in research). Government issues currency and draws upon the wealth of the nation for funding. Taxes drive demand for currency, they don't fund the government.

Separate topic, but I'm curious if making a statement like that open up the possibility that one could be served a subpoena to testify what was said?

I believe Aaron had come to him under attorney/client privilege at that time. Just because Lessig had to step out due to a conflict doesn't change that fact.

Ordinarily yes, but attorney–client privilege would apply here.

The problem is not that Aaron accessed the information; it is that he abused the public resources used to maintain the store of information, and further that he did so in such an egregious matter. He would not have been prosecuted if he had just downloaded a dozen articles, but he downloaded 4 million.

4 million, 40 million - it's just bytes on a wire. I web scraped 35,000 articles from the AJCN recently, about 11 Gigabytes worth. I didn't ask permission - I just checked to see if my $10 temporary AJCN account could do it and set up an awk script generate the appropriate curl requests, so I have a lot of empathy for Aaron here.

Understand that Aaron's entire purpose was to Liberate Information that should have been free in the first place, so what he was doing was the exact opposite of abuse.

To the best of my knowledge, and from what I can recall in the case, the real issue was the Physical Break and Enter - which should have resulted in all of 40 hours of community service and an apology to MIT.

We talked about this on previous threads (when he was still alive). Distributing static content is a very much solved problem. Even then, if you don't want someone to download 4 million articles, don't enable them to do so. Every time I ask JSTOR for an article, their servers vet the request and then fulfill it (or not).

The research might be paid for by tax-payers money but journals aren't, they cost significant amounts of money to run (it typically takes a decade before a journal builds enough of a reputation to break even).

You could argue publicly funded researchers shouldn't submit to non-open journals, but that's not an argument for depriving publishers renumeration for the work they've done. The profit margin for both closed and open-access journals is typically around 20% (for some of the top-tier journals it goes upto 30%) - except with open-access journals it really is the taxpayer who is paying for the publication as the author's institution typically picks up the cost (as opposed to non-open journal where the cost is distributed among customers of the journal).

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