[bdhe]

Interesting way of putting it. I would have said "removing the data from his possession"

This is part of a standard narrative to treat copyright infringement as theft analogous to theft of "tangible" traditional property. You will also notice terms like "documents were stolen" in the original indictment. Although to be fair to JSTOR, their official statement did not use such (imho) misleading language.

[_delirium]

To really increase the realism of the metaphor, in the future when such content is stolen, they should refuse to serve it to library users. They could explain that, regrettably, the journal issue I seek is currently missing due to a recent theft, and assure me that they are working as fast as possible to recover the stolen documents.

[jamesbritt]

My local library is like that. I've had to wait on checking out a PDF because all available copies were taken.

Yay, future!

[knieveltech]

Pleas please please tell me this is a joke? Set numbers of PDF checkouts? I don't know if I should weep or vomit.

[tedunangst]

Physical books impose a natural limit on the number of simultaneous checkouts. If a book is very popular, the library will buy more copies to accommodate demand. If a PDF is popular, the publisher expects the library to buy more copies.

It's artificial scarcity, but this is hardly new. The number of books in a library was never limited by the cost of paper.

[antihero]

Artificial scarcity is possibly one of the most perverse things to come out capitalism.

[stcredzero]

The particular 1 bits he took were of unusually high quality.

[GHFigs]

"We secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken..."

http://about.jstor.org/news-events/news/jstor-statement-misu...