Re: [DIYbio] legality of distributing pdfs or hard copy papers?

> As for his work on JSTOR, regardless of the charges there was no
> distribution of content from his machine, so I am not sure why you
> would cite that either...

That's an even better example, then. He didn't even *infringe*
copyright; as a fellow at the university, he would even have had a
right to download all those articles. And yet: there it is. Sued for
copyright infringement and threatened with over 40 years in federal
prison.

Copyright is *not even remotely sane*. If you value your freedom,
don't tie your identity to reasonable activities like sharing 1s and
0s. This is trivial for normal cultural stuff like movies and music:
VPNs. This is because the costs for litigating against people behind
VPNs is higher, and the copyright industries are making plenty of
money suing others spuriously (even if the odds of being sued for
copyright infringement are normally lower than being struck by lightning).

However, if someone were to publicly release documents not already
readily available, the odds of being targeted become substantially
higher than the (stupidly low) odds against those doing normal
sharing. This is where someone sharing knowledge puts themselves at
risk, like Aaron did; not only are they the gateway for others to
knowledge, they have their name attached to emails or blogposts saying
they did it; it makes litigation trivial.

So, anyone thinking of engaging in the scurrilous practise of sharing
knowledge or culture is well advised to simply use stuff like
torproject.org to protect themselves, and to not post anything under
their own names. Common sense also dictates that such persons share
their knowledge in more than one place, ideally more than one
jurisdiction, to make censorship less trivial.

On 04/23/2013 08:32 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 2:28 PM, Cathal Garvey
> <cathalgarvey@cathalgarvey.me> wrote:
>> Aaron Swartz's case makes it pretty clear that even distributing
>> out-of-copyright papers is grounds for ruinous copyright
>> litigation. Yay knowledge.
>
> Are you referring to his work on PACER? Although the FBI made him
> the subject of an active investigation, there were no charges
> brought against him from his PACER downloads. There was also no
> resulting copyright litigation. As for his work on JSTOR,
> regardless of the charges there was no distribution of content from
> his machine, so I am not sure why you would cite that either...
>
> - Bryan http://heybryan.org/ 1 512 203 0507
>

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