And they will still be one of those schools that taunts the other school at football games that someday they'll end up working for Harvard grads. Life is unfair, as a famous and lucky Harvard graduate liked to say.
It's certainly ironic that this guy was studying ethics, but don't universities pay JSTOR and other databases to get access to articles for their students? Wouldn't this guy have access as a Harvard fellow. Maybe not enough to copy 4 million articles, but all the access he would reasonably have needed?
The article says he wanted to distribute the papers for free on a file-sharing website — sort of a nerdy Napster, I guess. He must think there’s a clamoring among the masses for free access to academic treatises.
JSTOR is a nonprofit that gets funding from foundations and utilizes funds from institutions in a co-op fashion to maintain hosting and continue document scanning - the latter was likely much more capital and labor intensive years ago and largely negated in recent years.
Its content is generally 5 years old or older - a collection of out-of-print academic journals.
It’s an interesting copyright case because from all appearances the content is not sold or licensed per-article or per download, instead member institutions get access to the database and articles. It’s almost an electronic used-book repository all author-publisher considerations are likely long expired or fulfilled, and the publisher is now drawing relatively small considerations for “back catalog.”