Describing Public Domain Works As 'Pirated' And 'Illegal' Is Bad For Everyone | Techdirt

"Yahoo Tech has an interesting column about an 'art project' in Germany, where a bunch of folks are printing out 250,000 academic papers from JSTOR, which they're describing as the JSTOR Pirate Headquarters. Of course, as I'm sure you know, JSTOR -- the somewhat controversial organization that hosts thousands of academic articles behind a massively high paywall -- was a central player in the Aaron Swartz saga. It was JSTOR's collection that Aaron was caught downloading, though it was never entirely clear what he was going to do with it. Soon after Aaron's arrest, a guy by the name of Greg Maxwell got some attention by releasing 33GB of JSTOR scientific papers to the Pirate Bay. While he'd considered doing so before, he had held off out of concern for how JSTOR might react. But the simple fact was that all of the papers he released were public domain papers, meaning that JSTOR would have no right to complain. In fact, a few months later, JSTOR itself agreed to make all its public domain materials free. JSTOR freely admits that Maxwell's decision influenced the move, but that they had been planning to do something like this anyway. So, back to Germany and the 'JSTOR Pirate Headquarters.' As the Yahoo story notes, the folks there were inspired by the Swartz story to try to create some sort of civil disobedience act, with the initial plan being to print out the documents Swartz downloaded -- but, of course, that database has long since gone away. Instead, they found Maxwell's torrent, and decided to print that out. The problem is that throughout the story, everyone seems to pretend that this is some sort of illegal act of piracy. Beyond the fact that they call it the JSTOR Pirate Headquarters, the article by Rob Walker opens this way: 'For several days now, five printers in Düsseldorf, Germany, have been pumping out illegally-downloaded articles from JSTOR, the digital library of academic journals.' Except they're not illegally downloaded. They're public domain, which makes them perfectly legal to download. Then Walker claims: 'If you’re in the area, you can stop by and browse this stuff – which would cost you something like $353,229 to buy from JSTOR itself.' Except that's not true either, because JSTOR made the same documents free ..."