I keep on hearing this, and it continues to make no sense to me, so forgive me for reposting one of previous posts (s/commercial value/business model/ if it helps):
It seems implausible to me that publishing the contents of JSTOR in such a way would actually destroy any substantial amount of JSTOR's value. What university would actually drop their JSTOR subscription in favour of a bunch of unlicensed PDFs they torrented? JSTOR, in addition to keeping you on the right side of copyright law, gives you all their systems for querying their data, and keeps itself up to date.
Maybe a university in a developing country would drop their subscription, but any in the US? I find it unlikely.
Such a torrent would be far more useful to an individual who didn't have access to an organization that subscribed. However it seems these pay-per-download fees only account for a fraction of a percent of JSTOR's operating budget (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064408).
So it looks like there is some feasible harm there, but by no means destroyed commercial value.
I keep on hearing this, and it continues to make no sense to me, so forgive me for reposting one of previous posts (s/commercial value/business model/ if it helps):
It seems implausible to me that publishing the contents of JSTOR in such a way would actually destroy any substantial amount of JSTOR's value. What university would actually drop their JSTOR subscription in favour of a bunch of unlicensed PDFs they torrented? JSTOR, in addition to keeping you on the right side of copyright law, gives you all their systems for querying their data, and keeps itself up to date. Maybe a university in a developing country would drop their subscription, but any in the US? I find it unlikely. Such a torrent would be far more useful to an individual who didn't have access to an organization that subscribed. However it seems these pay-per-download fees only account for a fraction of a percent of JSTOR's operating budget (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064408). So it looks like there is some feasible harm there, but by no means destroyed commercial value.