[thisuser]

He is accused of stealing bandwidth from JSTOR, not the documents. "Theft of services" not theft of property. Theft of bandwidth is almost as absurd as theft via copying. JSTOR apparently isn't interested in free transmission of knowledge

[a3camero]

If you read the indictment you'll see that they very much are not interested in free transmission of knowledge.

They charge >$50k/yr for access: " For a large research university, this annual subscription fee for JSTOR’s various collections of content can cost more than $50,000."

[jackpirate]

That price actually seems pretty reasonable for a large research university.

The real question is how much they charge individuals who want to get an article. My first google search (http://www.jstor.org/pss/27757488) results in $12/article. This is very steep when you're trying to do research and don't even know if the article is what you're looking for.

[Vivtek]

Well, you wouldn't want any old rabble getting access to valuable knowledge. Far better for that access to be safely controlled by the major research institutions, who can clearly be trusted to pursue knowledge in a responsible manner.

[a3camero]

How is that reasonable? Sounds like Mr. Swartz was willing to host them for free! And he would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those meddling police.

But seriously, $12/article is ludicrous. That must be way above cost recovery or they're not doing a very efficient job of running JSTOR. Perhaps the co-founder of Reddit would do a better job...

[xefer]

Most public libraries have relationships with JSTOR that allow members to access the articles online. I use the Boston Public Library and look up articles via Google Scholar. All free.

[kragen]

Some public libraries do, but the vast majority of public libraries in the world do not.

[ars]

Are you sure? Maybe not in the world, but I'm pretty sure all large public libraries in the US do subscribe to these kinds of databases.

[kragen]

I admit that I don't have statistics [edit: on libraries], but most libraries in the world are not large or in the US, and JSTOR's prices for a "small" library in "the rest of the world" are much, much larger than [edit: wrong — comparable to or perhaps a bit larger than, but not much, much larger than] their entire budget. Check out http://support.jstor.org/csp/PriceCalculator/. This code (for Chrome) gives me a yearly price of $81162.70, although it hangs the browser for a while first:

    function mouseEvent() { var event = document.createEvent("MouseEvents"); event.initMouseEvent("click", true, true, window, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, false, false, false, false, 0, null); return event; }
    function each(list, thunk) { list = Array.prototype.slice.call(list); for (var ii = 0; ii < list.length; ii++) { thunk(list[ii]); } }
    each(document.getElementsByClassName('expand'), function(link) { link.dispatchEvent(mouseEvent()) })
    each(document.getElementsByClassName('e-only'), function(link) { link.dispatchEvent(mouseEvent()) })

[apu]

relationships = they pay the institutional fee (possibly reduced) to JSTOR