Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by raverbashing 3451 days ago
Sci-Hub did a better job of making knowledge available

What he did was inconsequential and then he preferred to quit rather than face the consequences (to which he would probably get support from the whole internet)

A.S. looks like more than a prankster who never got told that actions have consequences and an idealist that was too naive for his own good.
1 comments
cooper12 3451 days ago
Saying that he merely "quit", like he just walked out of the room or something, extremely trivializes depression and suicide. Also, the consequences in this case were disproportionate to the crime, with JSTOR listing inflated damages, and the prosecutor wanting to make an examples of him.

Lastly your whole comment is framed as a personal attack. You say "inconsequential" even though we have no clue what he was planning to do since he was made to delete the files, and you say "prankster" like was just trolling MIT and JSTOR. I recommend instead that you instead try to read a little about him, he accomplished much more then you gave him credit for.

link
raverbashing 3451 days ago
> Saying that he merely "quit", like he just walked out of the room or something, extremely trivializes depression and suicide

True, I had considered this angle but I ended up not adding it to the comment. But I recognize the importance of those factors

> the consequences in this case were disproportionate to the crime, with JSTOR listing inflated damages

No contest on the inflated damages, which is part of most legal cases unfortunately, but he could have gotten the best lawyers to this case.

> even though we have no clue what he was planning to do

Scraping files is an action on itself that gives several suggestions on what he was going to do with them.

> and you say "prankster" like was just trolling MIT and JSTOR

Well he was at least doing that.

link
cooper12 3451 days ago
I'm assuming you're thinking is that he was going to distribute them. While his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto [0] might support that, it's just one possibility. Or he might have analyzed the papers for personal research, as he did in the past:

> A few years ago, he downloaded a significant portion of the articles on the Westlaw legal-research database in order to analyze their sources of funding, in the hope of determining whether economic interests affected their conclusions. He gave the data to a Stanford law student, and she published an article in the Stanford Law Review based on his findings. [1]

[0]: https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...

[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/requiem-for-a-d...

link
aptwebapps 3451 days ago
I thought JSTOR didn't want to press charges once the data was deleted? I believe they were firmer about that than MIT which took a somewhat hands-off approach.
link
cooper12 3451 days ago
Yeah you're correct on both accounts. However the prosecutor in the case still wanted to charge him and it wasn't their decision to make.
link