[kragen]

Oh, thanks for finding that error!

I think you're thinking very much of US salaries. $40,000 a year shouldn't be a lot of money for a public library in the US, because it's the salary for a single employee (or the total costs for half an employee!), and the wonderful public library system in the US does indeed have multiple libraries. But world GDP per person is about US$10k per year, compared to the US's US$47k — and the bulk of that GDP comes from a few rich countries with only a small fraction of the population. An average country is something like Jamaica, Thailand, or the Dominican Republic, where the per-capita GDP is something like US$8.8k.

So US$40k per year is the salary for almost five employees. Except that within Jamaica or Thailand (or, to a lesser extent, the US) the median salary is much lower. And it's probably not the prime minister's niece who's working the librarian job. So maybe it's more like eight to ten employees.

So, yeah, most libraries — even measured numerically, but especially measured by the number of people who rely on them — are a lot poorer than what you're used to.

I haven't checked yet to see if the National Library here in Buenos Aires has JSTOR access.

[ars]

I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that if you contacted JSTOR from a low income country they may give a better deal.

BTW, if you really do need JSTOR, it's not hard to find a library card number from a US library and use that for access anywhere. (Well, I don't know JSTOR specifically, but all the other databases I've used from my library are available to me at home after I put in my library card number.)

[kragen]

Their price schedule divides "Public Library – Small" into "US", "Canada", and "Rest of the World". It's possible that someone phoning them up from Senegal or Paraguay would be able to negotiate a lower price, but it's not as if their existing price list doesn't recognize the existence of different countries. (Still, lumping Switzerland and Malawi into the same category might not represent a deep level of consideration of the issues.)

For what it's worth, I was using their web site from my house here in Argentina, which is usually classified as a "middle-income country," but where you can hire a full-time employee illegally for US$4000 per year.

[ars]

The prices are the same for all the versions (size or location), so I don't know why they ask.

The only thing that seems to change the price is the organization type.

[roel_v]

So a Mercedes should cost 1/10th in Zimbabwe of what it does in the West, if people make 1/10th there?

[kragen]

I was rebutting a factual claim ("Most public libraries have relationships with JSTOR that allow members to access the articles online"), not a normative one. An analogous factual claim might be that most Zimbabweans drive Mercedes. Even without having access to Mercedes's sales figures by nation, that ought to appear unlikely to you?

[roel_v]

Yes, let's agree on and further reason from the the premise that it is not currently true that most Zimbabweans drive Mercedeses ;)

My point was: your argument seems to be based on refuting the argument that the JSTOR subscription is not expensive for the average library because it is only about one yearly salary of the average rank-and-file employee, by saying that that only holds for the libraries in the US (maybe some parts of Europe, but let's say the US for the sake of this argument), and that in many other countries salaries are lower and therefor the relative cost of a JSTOR subscription higher.

So, my (perhaps naive) interpretation of this is that your ulterior argument is that JSTOR is too expensive for many libraries outside of the US, and that they therefore don't have access to its contents.

I further deduce from that, from the context in which you bring it up, is that you don't find it a problem that people take the content from JSTOR and redistribute it to people who don't have easy access to libraries who do have a subscription. Now I'll grant that this is a fairly big leap to make, and maybe you're not holding that position; but within the given context (of people arguing pro and con the actions of the Reddit guy what's-his-name), I think it's not unreasonable of me to assume so, either.

So, to close the circle, my 'question' was (but of course it is a 'question' that is, in the end, a way of stating my position in the discussion...) if it is reasonable to hold that when something is too expensive for people, it is OK to circumvent the rights holders' restrictions on the use of something. (I'm deliberately being vague on issues like 'moral ought' vs 'legal ought', if JSTOR really has a common-law variation of a database right on their collection, jurisdiction etc. - I don't really think they're important for the question at hand).