these jstor tags look like something you’d see on ao3
WHAT OF IT, HMMMM?
remember that time JSTOR handed information on Aaron Swartz over to the US government which led directly to his arrest on trumped-up charges of copyright violations and his later suicide due to being harangued and harassed by the US attorney in Boston? that was a good time
i’m glad organizations like JSTOR can hold decades of publicly-funded research hostage and control its distribution through arbitrary, authoritative means of dissemination as well as use the state as an enforcement mechanism to protect and assert its private control over information that ought to be public domain
thank u JSTOR for protecting the property rights of highly-funded bourgeois universities and making sure us poor plebs can’t access information at-will, to the point that you willfully hand someone over to the fucking Secret Service because, hey, what’s a suicide here or there to protect your profits, aye?
Aaron Schwartz was threatened with 35 years in prison for a crime with no victim, he downloaded scientific papers and put them up online. The university he “stole” from wasn’t even upset and declined to press charges.
But the prosecutor wanted to make a career for himself as prosecuting “cyber-terrorism” the then-new fake scare in the war on terrorism.
Aaron buckled under the pressure and committed suicide. And those fucking bastards at JSTOR and the federal government murdered him.