Colombian Student Faces Prison Charges for Sharing an Academic Article Online

What surprises me the most is that this came from the author of the paper, not the publisher. In my experience, authors don't see any kind of royalties from any publication fees, and generally there are even fees (often significant ones) associated with having your work published in a journal. Generally, if you're the author of a given paper, you'd prefer if your paper were published for everyone to read (even beyond the intangibles, this could increase citation count), whereas the publisher is the one with an incentive to keep it gated. In fact, some journals are now offering creative commons licensing as an upsell - pay a certain amount of money and there's no paywall on this article.

This EFF article may be playing a bit fast-and-loose with the term "article", though. I'm seeing something here about how it was actually someone's thesis, and that the author was concerned that the person who put it on Scribd did so in an attempt to profit off of some sort of system of fees. It's not clear to me why it would go as far as prosecution, though, unless issuing a takedown request necessitates full criminal prosecution...

So in a country that has seen tens of thousands of extrajudicial killings in recent decades, not to mention cases of "torture, rape, incineration, decapitation and mutilation with chainsaws or machetes of dozens of their victims at a time, affecting civilians, women and children" (according to sources quoted by WP) -- the vast majority of which have never been prosecuted, and most likely never will be -- they're going to string this guy up for... sharing a PDF?

And for the sake of... a "free trade" agreement?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramilitarism_in_Colombia

My stance on this is that while he did do something "wrong", this should not be something that he gets in signifigant trouble over.

He did post someone's work to the Internet, but seriously? Prison would be absolutely ridiculous for something like this.

Do we want to live in an open society or a gated one?

Aaron Swartz 2.0