From the indictment: JSTOR is a not-for-profit (=no tax liability?). JSTOR charges universities annual subscription fees as high as $50,000.
Are we told anywhere what JSTOR's actual costs are for scanning documents and serving PDF's? Yes. Someone provided a link to details of JSTOR's budget in the other Swartz thread. Very interesting. They appear to be some very well paid "librarians" (archivists). And lo and behold, they are trying to figure out how to make Google bucks. Seed the Google index with links to JSTOR articles that sit behind a paywall, then charge $10 or more for a la carte access. (Can you feel the desperation?)
Sounds great, they can piggyback on Google, maybe run some SEO, do some behavioural tracking and all that. But there's just one problem: this is library material. Library as in the kind that is funded by grants, taxes, tuition or endowments. Non-commercial. And even more, does Google Scholar show ads? Do they charge anyone for access?
I'd put my money on projects like archive.org or publicresource.org, who charge nothing, before I'd bet on these guys. Sadly, this criminal case may really be all for nothing. Because businesses like JSTOR will likely fail, not because of kids like Swartz, but because they simply are not as smart about technology as the folks who run sites like archive and publicresource.
Are we told anywhere what JSTOR's actual costs are for scanning documents and serving PDF's? Yes. Someone provided a link to details of JSTOR's budget in the other Swartz thread. Very interesting. They appear to be some very well paid "librarians" (archivists). And lo and behold, they are trying to figure out how to make Google bucks. Seed the Google index with links to JSTOR articles that sit behind a paywall, then charge $10 or more for a la carte access. (Can you feel the desperation?)
Sounds great, they can piggyback on Google, maybe run some SEO, do some behavioural tracking and all that. But there's just one problem: this is library material. Library as in the kind that is funded by grants, taxes, tuition or endowments. Non-commercial. And even more, does Google Scholar show ads? Do they charge anyone for access?
I'd put my money on projects like archive.org or publicresource.org, who charge nothing, before I'd bet on these guys. Sadly, this criminal case may really be all for nothing. Because businesses like JSTOR will likely fail, not because of kids like Swartz, but because they simply are not as smart about technology as the folks who run sites like archive and publicresource.