Information should be free.

Agreed, to an extent, but that doesn't mean you can breach any barrier someone has in place preventing access, take it, and make it publicly available.

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zymhan 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Surely it depends on the specific information in question?

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pdonis 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The information Swartz was downloading was scientific papers that we, the public, have already paid for with our tax dollars. The crime here is that the government allows JSTOR and other private companies to still hold those papers behind paywalls instead of releasing them into the public domain as they should have been.

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s1artibartfast 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access.

The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge.

Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding. That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition.

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silver_sun 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge.

I think a better analogy for this situation is: The public donates food, then the recipient, after being fed, sells access to (infinite cheaply replicable copies of) said food for a profit. The public in this case just wants to have said food.

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pdonis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access.

So when your tax dollars pay for a scientist to do research, you don't think the papers that document that research should be public property? If scientists want to keep their research private, they should find private funding.

Note that, as in my previous post, I said "should". If you mean there isn't explicit language to that effect in the grants, see further comments below.

> The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge.

Invalid comparison. The scientific papers in question are not the personal property of the scientists.

> Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding.

IMO this should be the case, and it's an outrage that it's not, since it should be an obvious requirement for any research that our tax dollars pay for.

> That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition.

Maybe that wasn't written into the grants explicitly, but that just means our government is (once again) failing to act in our best interests.

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s1artibartfast 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It seems like you are jumping between the reality you would like and the reality that exists.

It is fine to want for something to be different, but that doesn't change the facts of how they are.

It's fine to advocate future papers be made public. I think it is antisocial and delusional to say past papers belong to the public just because that's what you would have wanted. The word for this is expostfacto recontracting, and undermines just about any system of law where is used.

Last, there are lots of reasons to pay for research even if it is not made public. Free public access is often the least of those concerns. Especially so when 99% of researchers whom might make meaningful use of the publication already have access through a journal system.

To understand this better, consider private drug patents coming from Public Funding. The government might rightly calculate that it is in the public interest too help a for-profit company develop a cancer cure with grants, then have no cure at all.

	▲	pdonis 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> It seems like you are jumping between the reality you would like and the reality that exists. No, you did that, by responding to my post where I said "should" as though I were trying to describe how things are instead of how they ought to be. > I think it is antisocial and delusional to say past papers belong to the public just because that's what you would have wanted. I didn't say that. You need to work on your reading comprehension. > The word for this is expostfacto recontracting No, the word for what you're doing is putting words in my mouth and attacking a straw man. > there are lots of reasons to pay for research even if it is not made public. Can you give some? > Especially so when 99% of researchers whom might make meaningful use of the publication already have access through a journal system. Which they then have to pay fees to, using more of our tax dollars, because of the sweetheart deals the government has given the journals. Not only that, but researchers nowadays share copies of papers over the Internet routinely (for example, using sites like arxiv.org), so they don't even need journals to know what other researchers are doing. So even that rationale for paying the journals is now out of date. > consider private drug patents coming from Public Funding A patent requires revealing the information that the invention is based on, in exchange for the exclusive right to produce the item for some period of time. So I don't see how this is an argument for keeping publicly funded research behind a paywall.

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aeve890 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What's the point of statements so broad and ambiguous that they seem to disregard any kind of context or nuance? Do you really believe that _Information_ should be free? Which one? All of it?

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MattDamonSpace 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

“People who generate valuable information should be uncompensated”

	▲	msftgreed 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You say this like it's related to the parent quote. We could absolutely compensate people and not charge for information. It's not that hard to imagine that we could feed, house, care for, and provide a small stipend to authors, artists, etc. and also make their work output free to everyone who wants it. Does that require changing some other things? Absolutely. Would it be hard to convince people to try? Probably (I'm guessing HN crowd won't like this comment, considering it unreasonable.) Has it been a suggested way to organize society for almost 200 years with a long and well argued set of principles behind it? Sure enough!
	▲	pdonis 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The scientists who wrote the papers that Swartz downloaded were compensated, with the public's tax dollars. That should mean that we the public should now have free access to what we paid for. Unfortunately the government prefers to let private companies keep those papers behind paywalls.