[Permit]

> Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry

Every day hundreds of links to archive.is are posted[1] to this website to get around paywalls. Technologists built file sharing tools to subvert copyright. It has never been one of the worst crimes imaginable in tech circles.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru... (85 instances in the last week)

[avaer]

You might be looking at a small time horizon.

What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists ?

[direwolf20]

Let's not forget the death of Aaron Swartz.

[avaer]

I don't think that was the "tech circles" being pro-copyright though.

I've never met someone who wasn't on Aaron's side on that one.

[anonymous908213]

"Tech circles" was never the claim. The original phrase was "tech industry", and that seems to be accurate. The post replying to it may have misread or misinterpreted what "tech industry" means. (Or perhaps the term is simply ambiguous and each person who reads it comes away with a different meaning!)

[aleph_minus_one]

> I've never met someone who wasn't on Aaron's side on that one.

This rather says something about the people by who you are surrounded. I know quite a lot of people who are on Aaron Swartz side here, for example people who are in academia or those who left academia but are still deeply interested in scientific topics.

[direwolf20]

You agree with them

[aleph_minus_one]

Sorry, because I am not a native English speaker I misunderstood something. :-(

[Dracophoenix]

Jstor is a tech company?

[jazzyjackson]

Well they certainly aren’t selling paper

[Dracophoenix]

Jstor is an information database provider that that specializes in the republication of academic journal articles. The web is the company's delivery mechanism, not the defining trait of the its existence. A public-facing website doesn't make it anymore of a tech company as such than it would the New York Times.

[larsonian]

NYT is more of a tech company than you might think [1] and they've been one for longer than you might think: the de-facto standard profiler for Perl [2], of all things, comes from them.

[1] https://open.nytimes.com/

[2] https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::NYTProf

[ineedasername]

Maybe the time horizon for a statement like that shouldn’t include the decades before most current tech companies existed, much less at this scale even for the few still kicking around from 50 years ago.