Monthly Archives: January 2013

View 759 Sunday, January 20, 2013

Richard and Herrin and the grandchildren are on visits to California friends, so in theory we had the day to catch up, but in fact the day was devoured by locusts. All small and nearly trivial problems that ate time.

I am grateful to Thermaltake and their gaming keyboards. Roberta managed to spill coffee in her old Gateway, and at the same time my old Ortek decided that the n key was going to be flakey. I found a Thermaltake for Roberta, and another for me. The one I have is the Challenger and comes in a professional carry bag. Everything Thermaltake does is in the direction of elegance. Of course keyboards and gaming keyboards are greatly a matter of personal preferences. The Thermaltake Challenger is definitely not a writer’s keyboard, and after Richard’s family goes back east I’m going out to Fry’s to get a Microsoft Comfort Curve keyboard. I prefer the old Ortek but it is really OLD, and no longer reliable. If I did a lot of gaming I’d keep the Challenger in place, and in fact the simple solution would be to make some changes in my setup here and use the Comfort Curve on Emily over here on my main Windows machine. But I’m planning on replacing both the main Windows machines here with newly built systems anyway.

One thing we have learned is that Windows 8 may be great for gamers and other home use but Windows 7 is more than good enough for writers and office use. I think Windows 8 should be reserved for touch control machines. Windows 7 is still the best Windows yet, and in fact it’s the reason I haven’t converted everything to Mac systems. I was on the way to that conversion when 7 replaced (ugh) Vista, and 7 seduced me back to the dark side. Apple is too persnickety about things being done the Mac way or no way at all. Underneath the hood there’s real UNIX in Macs and that will solve almost all Mac problems, but UNIX remains the guru-friendly system. Ah well. More on that another time.

The Thermaltake keyboard is elegant, but the keys are too close together (perhaps that is a good thing if you are primarily a gamer) and I find I have the CAPS LOCK key on a lot when I didn’t want it. As far as I am concerned CAPS LOCK could be on a key switch over to one side of the keyboard. On my old ORTEK I disabled it by stuffing rubber foam under the key until it takes real pressure to activate it. If I keep this Thermaltake in service (not likely because the keys are just too close together for my style of typing) I’ll try that trick with it, only I don’t quite remember where I got the foam rubber. Probably from a dying chair.

I will repeat that Thermaltake has elegant products. I love their cases and their power supplies and cables and those work extremely well as well as look elegant. Their accessories run to the expensive elegant and impressive side – which is in fact a bit appealing, but not for keyboards where you have to do a lot of writing. Which is why I am still using, or wish I were still using, a 20 year old ORTEK programmable, and Roberta is using an even older Gateway. Or she may be. She’s got a Thermaltake now, and I washed her coffee soaked Gateway in the shower. That often fixes them. We can hope it works with hers. And for my ORTEK for that matter.

Anyway, I’m catching up, trying to get some work done. I don’t seem to be catching up although I am dancing as fast as I can.

View 758 Thursday, January 17, 2013

My son Richard, his wife Herrin, and two grandchildren are here. In addition, I am working on getting the Reader finished and in publication, and I am proofreading the final of HIGHER EDUCATION by Charles Sheffield and Jerry Pournelle for eBook publication. And I am working on two novels. I’m dancing as fast as I can…

Prosecutor defends actions in Aaron Swartz case – on Technology

I saw this story on NBCNews.com and thought you’d find it interesting.

** Prosecutor defends actions in Aaron Swartz case ** The U.S. attorney who directed the prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who took his life last Friday, made her first public comme…

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/prosecutor-defends-actions-aaron-swartz-case-1B8016963

For more news, visit http://www.NBCNews.com

Dear Jerry:

Apparently whoever threatened Aaron Swartz with a long jail sentence did

not work for the U.S. Attorney. They were going to give him six months

at a Federal country club. So the mystery deepens.

Sincerely,

Francis Hamit

Which makes the story even stranger. Of course the usual practice of prosecuting attorneys is to threaten the maximum penalty while offering something much smaller in exchange for a guilty plea. One presumes that what Swartz wanted was a trial in which his defense would be along the lines of liberation of public owned property: that he was entitled to copies of the materials he had downloaded. Why he believed – as apparently he did –- that he was faced with ruinous fines and decades in prison as opposed to a few months at Camp Fed in the company of financial offenders is not clear.

Leaving Swartz out of it, there remains the question of distribution of public documents. I find impossible to believe that setting up monopolies on the distribution of documents reporting publicly financed research fits any constitutional definition of promoting useful arts and science. I understand that journals must be financed. The editorial activities of soliciting peer reviews and doing initial publication have to be paid for; but the current system is simply ridiculous. ITHAKA and JSTOR pretty well prohibit widespread distribution outside academia; but the taxes that paid for the research certainly apply to the general public.

Perhaps Swartz’s legacy will be a new look at our whole journal distribution system with a view to promote the progress of science and the useful arts – and to make available to the public the results of publicly financed research. That issue is not settled.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an op ed article

Keith Hennessey: How to Wage the Debt-Ceiling Fight

Republicans ought to make Obama an offer that would put him at odds with members of his party.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324081704578236042135383394.html

Step one is for House Republicans to argue for and pass a debt-limit increase combined with present and future spending cuts. Mr. Obama will reject deep spending cuts and accuse Republicans of playing dangerous games with our financial system. So what next?

The president wants a very large increase in the debt ceiling—he and his team have demanded either no limit at all, or a five-year increase, which means at least a few trillion dollars. His obvious goal is to punt the issue past the 2014 midterm election. Yet if he has to ask Congress for a new increase every few months, the spending problem his administration has exacerbated in his first term will dominate the policy agenda—when he wants to work on other issues.

That brings us to step two, which is for congressional Republicans to offer Mr. Obama a choice. He can have a long-term debt-limit increase if he agrees to cut spending, or he can have repeated, short-term increases without spending cuts. If the president continues to dodge the country’s long-term spending problem, the solution is to force him to ask Congress every few months to give him the authority to borrow more while facing questions about why he refuses to restrain spending.

The article continues with arguments for his strategy. For those who believe, as I do, that it is vital for the United States to stop the automatic growth of government – in particular the exponential baseline expansion, replacing it with zero growth baseline so that a cut in a budget item really is a cut, not merely a reduction of the increase which has been promised, this seems like the right idea. The Constitution requires that money bills originate in the House.

The first move ought to be reform of the budget process to eliminate the growth that is built in to continuing resolutions. Then Hennessey’s strategy will work, possibly quite splendidly.

Some views on conscription

The Draft

Jerry,

I have always thought that it would be a good idea to make completion of Basic Training (Boot Camp, et al) a requirement to graduate High School. One wouldn’t need to continue on to the specialization schools (infantry, radio operator, cook & so on), and of course those who have a physical or mental handicap that might preclude them from completing basic shouldn’t be required to attempt it. I realize that there are able-bodied and mentally competent individuals that would still refuse going through any sort of military style training, I will call them conscientious objectors I suppose, for them and perhaps for those with handicaps where appropriate why not require them to do some sort of equivalent time in the Peace Corps or something similar. I think something that could be accomplished over a summer, or less would be appropriate.

Since I hate me some commie peace-nik types, I’d want the Peace Corps side of things to be conducted overseas in a nasty, brutish, possibly dangerous part of the world; and of course you wouldn’t be armed with any terrible weapon that could possibly hurt anyone, it being a Peace Corps and all…

Maybe I could be talked out of such a crazy idea if say the Peace Corps term was twice as long as the longest military basic training course. Or maybe make them into medics in a busy ER, clean operating rooms or something, we do now have Health-care for everyone to deal with now…

Coast Guard, Navy, Air Force are 8 weeks, Army is 9 weeks and Marines a grueling 13 weeks. I guess that’d make the Peace Corps requirement 26 weeks, six and a half months! Ouch, maybe some of the conscientious objectors would opt for Coast Guard, Navy or Air Force instead?

Anyhow, once you complete the 8-26 weeks of training that you opt to take, you are finished with it unless a REAL draft is needed, at that point you report to whichever branch of service you completed your training in for whatever specialized job they need you to do.

What do we do with the folks who opted for the Peace Corps-style term of service? I would think you figure out which branch of service needs people, and send them to the appropriate basic military school to get them started on the path to infantry, cook or whatever.

Of course, the genuinely handicapped individual isn’t and should not be sent through a military style training scheme, and I don’t think they should be forced to do a 26 week mandatory Peace Corps hitch to graduate either. Maybe make it a voluntary thing for them, 13-week if they choose? Sort of a civilian contractor type role, someone physically disabled might be able to work wonders on a computer for any war effort (or Peace Corps effort, I suppose). Mental disabilities might require a bit more creativity, but if they want to volunteer, surely they can contribute in some way.

Remember, my proposition is to make this a requirement for High School Graduation, one can always drop-out. Later in life, should they so decide, they can finish the requirement and get a GED, if they decide to.

Not quite a draft, but close enough to one to expedite the training process should a draft ever be needed.

-p

One approach is to legislate universal conscription, but make it easy enough to get out of. However, anyone who does not put in the conscript year is no longer eligible for any federal employment, and any employer is exempt from application of any anti-discrimination laws for refusing to hire someone who has not complied with the conscription law.  That has worked well enough for some nations.

conscription; Bill of Rights

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

I’m not in favor of conscription; I agree with Heinlein’s view of it. But I would also note that the conscription of the early Republic was for service in the militia, usually within the state and certainly within the Union. That’s a far cry from the national government having the power to draft people and send them into foreign countries. It makes sense to me to say that if a foreign war isn’t inspiring Americans to volunteer, it’s not a war we should be fighting. It’s a natural check on the kind of military adventurism that became popular in the United States around the time when the Progressive movement emerged.

I’m puzzled by your claim about the Bill of Rights not applying to the states. Certainly that was true when it was originally enacted. But the Fourteenth Amendment seems to say otherwise; if anything, its list—privileges and immunities, life, liberty, and property, AND equal protection of the laws—seems more all-inclusive than the explicitly named rights of the first eight amendments. Could you spare a brief explanation of why you think otherwise?

William H. Stoddard

The notion that the 14th Amendment implied rights against the states that could be inferred – rather than rights enacted by Act of Congress – was not applied until well into the 20th Century. Indeed, the notion of some kind of federal protection against religion didn’t come until quite late. Originally the States had the right to establish religions – seven of the original states had established religions when they accepted the Constitution. Leaving matters to the States and abstaining from ruling on “political matters” was the usual practice of the Supreme Court until the Roosevelt Administration.

But this is all fairly moot since the questions seem to be settled. Whether they have been settled properly is perhaps worth discussion. The search for perfection does not always end well.

View 758 Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Noam Chomsky Killed Aaron Swartz.

‘Lobbyists are only interested in money. Activists are only interested in power. Sometimes a great nexus of corruption thrusts forth a figure of genius, such as Al Gore, who dazzles us with a talent for both.’

<http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-chomsky-killed-aaron-swartz.html>

Roland Dobbins

The article claims that Aaron Swartz was enamored of the views of Noam Chomsky, and this self deception was the cause of his death. It is an interesting view, but it sheds far more light on the views of Mr. Chomsky than those of Mr. Swartz.

I will say from the beginning that I was never a great fan of Aaron Swartz and his circle of friends, and of course I believe in copyright and intellectual property rights. I am also a great fan of the Constitution of 1787, which does not grant the Federal Government the right to issue monopolies except under certain conditions. In the England of 1787 – which is to say England after the Civil War, England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 with its Bill of Rights – still accepted that great powers resided in the sovereignty of the Crown. There was some dispute as to how much of the power of the Crown resided in the King (and his appointed ministers) and how much had passed to Parliament, but there were few who dissented from the notion that government had great power over its subjects.

The Declaration of Independence challenged that notion. To the Declaration, governments derived their just powers from the consent of the governed, and nowhere else. The Convention of 1787 never made that declaration, although many of those who sat through those hot days of a Philadelphia summer accepted it; but they explicitly said that no such residuum of sovereign power was vested in the Federal Government. To the extent that there were unspecified powers they were reserved to the states of the people. This wasn’t in the exact wording of the Constitution – although Hamilton insisted that they were a logical implication – so the words were added to the Bill of Rights, so they might as well have been. Hamilton said there was no need for a Bill of Rights because the general government had no powers not explicitly granted in the Constitution, and he would have considered the notion of emanations from penumbras the ravings of a mad tyrant.

One of the residual powers definitely not granted to the general government – the feds – was the power to issue monopolies, either by Executive Decree (Executive Order, Royal Rescript, whatever you want to call it) of by Act of Congress.

One power was explicitly given:

“The Congress shall have power … To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Note that nothing was said about intellectual property.

Note also that nothing was said about who owns the rights to intellectual property created through grants of public money.

My – sympathy, affection, agreement, whatever you care to make it – with Aaron Swartz has to do with his challenge to ITHAKA’s monopoly of access to journal accounts and the high prices it charges. I think someone ought to challenge that monopoly, and I think Mr. Swartz performed a public service in doing so. I think a public trial of Mr. Swartz, which probably would have resulted in a conviction although jury nullification is always possible, would have been a healthy thing for all. As I say, it probably would have resulted in a conviction of Mr. Swartz, and his sentence to something under a year of imprisonment, and perhaps a fine (which would undoubtedly have been paid by public subscription). Instead the US Attorney sought 35 years of imprisonment, offering no alternative other than a plea of guilty – and thus no trial, and no challenge to the ITHAKA monopoly.

It seems as if the goal of that prosecution was not enforcement of laws against stealing, but prevention of a trial that would have exposed the ITHAKA monopoly.

I remain of that opinion.

Los Angeles has an interesting First Amendment case. A recent county initiative – a form of direct democracy that California seems to like a lot (unsurprising in a state given the history of its legislature) – requires that actors in pornography films wear condoms. One pornography company (which a few years ago required the use of condoms but abandoned that after it adopted a system of STD testing for all its performers) now challenges the law on the grounds that it adds nothing to public health, and restricts the First Amendment rights of both the producer and the performers.

A spokesman for the porn industry asserts that no one since 2005 has contracted AIDS from acting in a pornographic scene, and that more than 300,000 hard core pornographic scenes have been filmed since that time. One actor has come forward to assert that he has become HIV + as a result of being involved in pornographic movies. It is asserted that he engaged in sexual activities not part of any pornographic recordings, and the industry continues to assert that the condom requirement does nothing for public health while it does restrict the rights of free speech.

In the early days of the Republic it was explicit that the Bill of Rights did not necessarily apply to the States, and that continued even after the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment. After World War I this began to change and the Supreme Court began to assert that the Bill of Rights could be enforced by the Federal Government against the states. As an example, seven of the original 13 States had established churches with tax-paid clergy, and this continued the 1830’s when the last established church was disestablished by its state legislature. The regulation of religion including religious practices – such as benedictions and closing blessings at public ceremonies like road openings and public building dedications – was left entirely to the states. That is hardly the case now, as SCOTUS found emanations and penumbras in the Bill of Rights.

Is requiring an actor to wear a condom a violation of a right guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States?

I look forward to hearing the arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States a few years from now. when the Awful Majesty of the Law will tender us a decision.

Much of my day was devoured by locusts, but I now have new glasses, and they greatly improve my vision; clearly I went too long without getting new eye tests. Now to catch up.

National service 

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

Former General McChrystal is on record as favoring a draft of some kind.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/13/mcchrystal-time-to-think-about-bringing-back-the-draft/

“Service member” should not apply only to those in uniform, but to us all.

The concept of national service is not new, nor is it outdated. When America needs it, national service is the personal obligation of every American. And she needs it now.

All of us bear an obligation to serve—an obligation that goes beyond paying taxes, voting, or adhering to the law. America is falling short in endeavors that occur far away from any battlefield: education, science, politics, the environment, and cultivating leadership, among others."

I wanted your opinion on this, because I believe that this concept would be anathema to the founding fathers. While all able-bodied males were expected to be part of the militia, which could be federalized, the idea that the federal government could conscript labor at whim seems more like something which would be done by the Pharoahs of ancient Egypt rather than free Americans.

I just re-read the Declaration and the original bill of rights, and while it doesn’t appear this specific issue was addressed in either of those documents, there’s a little bell going off in the back of my mind to the extent this WAS addressed by the founders as not being a good thing. Perhaps in the federalist papers?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Machiavelli urged republics to employ conscription for their defense, rather than hiring long term professionals. His view was that standing armies became independent entities, and transmogrified into mercenaries. The United States had that view until, and for that matter after, World War II. The professional military of the United States was intended to deal with immediate matters, but it was not to be large. For the vast majority of the time of our republic, the Navy belonged to the President and could be used to intervene in foreign affairs, but the Department of War – the Army – belonged to the Congress and could be employed only in real declared wars.

Much of that changed after World War II, and of course the existence of the Air Force and particularly the Strategic Air Command complicated everything: SAC, after all, possessed the power to end the world as we knew it. This was clearly not a task for conscripts. Then came Viet Nam. And after that came the professional military, the volunteer forces, and the United States became the world superpower. So far that has not brought about the difficulties Machiavelli prophesied, and the Framers’ fear of large standing armies becoming the instrument of tyranny – since they could always subdue the militia – has not so far come to pass. I understand that many Old South loyalists might dispute that statement.

Universal manhood conscription has always had a unifying effect, and has been employed in nations such as Sweden and Switzerland – both known for their ability to maintain neutrality during world wars – with considerable success. One effect of conscription is to acquaint the citizens with each other: I had never known anyone but fellow Southernors when I went to Basic Training, and I certainly had never known any blacks my age. For that matter, I hadn’t really got to know any Southernors other than those from Shelby County, Tennessee. It was an enlightening experience for me. Of course I wasn’t a conscript, but many in the Basic Training barracks were.

In addition to enlightening experiences, subjection to basic military training was a positive experience for me, and I suspect to most of those around me. We griped, we complained, but we were at the age usually called ‘coming of age’ and that is no bad description.

The objection to conscription is that it is the ultimate tax, and Mr. Heinlein maintained that a nation that had to resort to conscription did not deserve to survive. This is an essentially moral argument and depends mostly on one’s premises. I will note that democracies have employed conscription far more often, and far more vigorously, than aristocracies and monarchies.

In response to your question, the Framers had mixed emotions on the subject. The Continental Congress clearly thought the States had the power of conscription and urged that they raise militias for the national service by impressment (generally for one year terms). This was employed without much success by some states, refused by others. By the time of the Civil War the federal Congress had no qualms about passing a conscription Act. nor did the Confederacy, and both sides employed conscript soldiers throughout the war.

I will also note that Rome not only employed conscription during the entire history of the Republic. Indeed. military service was considered a privilege. The Senate and People of Rome were very reluctant to erect long term standing armies.  Of course the Army was the mainstay of the Emperor after the collapse of the Republic.

In other words, you ask a very complex question to which the best answer is that we all need to give all this considerable thought. In general professional soldiers are much more effective than part time militias, and standing armies generally win when wars begin; the strength of democracies is that they could use professionals to hold off disaster while they raised armies. That is the traditional basis of the American Way of War. The argument is that the world has greatly changed now, and we have no choice but to have a large professional standing army. The counter argument is that such an army can be employed far more easily and in stickier situations than an army of citizens and their children.  We will not settle that here.

View 758 Tuesday, January 15, 2013

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial article of some importance today.

The Rise of the Accreditor as Big Man on Campus

The gatekeepers of federal student aid wield too much influence in higher education.

Who’s in charge of our colleges and universities—their boards of trustees or the accreditation organizations that are the gatekeepers of federal aid? That’s the question I’m left asking after a decision by the Southern Association of Colleges (SACS), one of six regional accreditors recognized by the U.S. Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, to put the University of Virginia, founded in 1819 by no less than Thomas Jefferson, on "warning."

SACS’s action comes in the wake of efforts by the University of Virginia’s governing board this summer—later reversed—to remove President Teresa Sullivan in favor of a leader more aggressively focused on cost controls. After months of criticism and second-guessing of the board’s decision, last month the accreditor sanctioned the university and placed it on a warning status pending further investigation.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323442804578232232920012910.html

As US higher education gets more expensive it also gets more useless; but it is able to do that because of its control of credentials. Now it appears that the bureaucracies that control accreditation of the colleges have become more active in forcing both the increase in expense and the ritualism that makes the education itself worth less. It’s a vicious circle with the Iron Law of Bureaucracy in control.

In 2007, when the University of California regents attempted to deal with runaway administrative costs through modest salary and benefit changes, they found themselves spending precious time responding to accreditor complaints that trustees were "unnecessarily harsh" with administrators. These are not isolated incidents. Across the country, boards of trustees are being effectively sidelined in their oversight responsibility, in deference to accreditor pressure.

The remedy of course is to change the whole notion of credentials and accreditation: judge the worth of an institution by its results. By their fruits you shall know them, Jesus told His followers; and it is splendid advice to follow in bureaucratic situations. Setting up procedures which, if followed, give you high accreditation marks even if you turn out students who can’t read – and there is increasing evidence that the number of students who graduate from accredited colleges functionally illiterate is rising – is a sure way to ruin.

In my early stories in which I postulated a spacefaring nation by 2010 I also assumed that major companies would have their own education programs turning out graduates who would be useful to the company. That was at one time happening. It can and should happen again.

When I first went into the Boeing Company nearly half the aeronautical engineers at Boeing were not university graduates: they began as draftsmen right out of high school and over the years learned the job. The other evening I saw my old friend Paul Turner, one of the last non-degree engineers from the space program. He retired from North American Rockwell as project manager of a small but significant station in Shuttle. You don’t have to have an expensive university degree to be a good engineer. It often helps – we used to have the slogan that the half-life of an engineering graduate was about seven years – but it also helps if you acquire the habit of staying current in your profession. The non-degree engineers always did. The best of the university graduate engineers did also, but there was also a significant number who stopped learning when they left university, and their half life was indeed about seven years.

The United States has the capability of regaining its position as the leading academic nation on Earth; but we have to change the accreditation system along with the whole notion of academic control of credentials. We need to get back to the notion that the best credential for doing a job is the ability to do it well. That particularly applies to teaching the young: our colleges of education, fully accredited, are shameless messes producing illiterate children. Shame.

Anonymous hacks MIT after Aaron Swartz’s suicide

Hacktivist group defaces university pages after the school promises a full investigation into MIT’s role in events leading up to the Internet activist taking his life.

After calling the prosecution of Swartz "a grotesque miscarriage of justice" and "a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for," Anonymous outlined its list of goals under a section labeled "Our wishes:"

• We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them.
• We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of copyright and intellectual property law, returning it to the proper principles of common good to the many, rather than private gain to the few.
• We call for this tragedy to be a basis for greater recognition of the oppression and injustices heaped daily by certain persons and institutions of authority upon anyone who dares to stand up and be counted for their beliefs, and for greater solidarity and mutual aid in response.
• We call for this tragedy to be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered internet, spared from censorship with equality of access and franchise for all.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57563752-93/anonymous-hacks-mit-after-aaron-swartzs-suicide/?tag=nl.e703&s_cid=e703

Of course this was to be expected – whether by Anonymous or some similar group. It shows very clearly the state of law and order in the electronic frontier, and its similarity to Deadwood or perhaps Dodge City without James Arness or even William Conrad.

This shouldn’t be taken as approval of the Anonymous action, but it’s fairly easy to sympathize with their view. The US Attorney in the Swartz case has famously said “Stealing is stealing!” and that Swartz deserved punishment. One can agree with that without approving her threatening him with 35 years imprisonment for a crime in which no one was harmed and nothing was actually republished.

Moreover, Swartz called attention to something important here: of the millions of documents he “stole” by downloading and recording copies of them (while of course leaving the originals in place for anyone else to download) the vast majority were reports of publicly funded studies and projects. Why ITHAKA, a non-profit whose executives are paid in excess of $200,000 a year (the CEO makes over $300,000), should have a monopoly on control of access to those documents, and be able to charge quite large fees for doing it, is not entirely clear: I would bet you that if there were some competition in the journal publishing business it could all be accomplished for a heck of a lot less than ITHAKA’s JSTOR charges. If I am incorrect I invite someone to defend the current situation.

My liberal friend Francis Hamit has some experience in this matter.

The Swartz case

Dear Jerry:

I have to say that the Arron Swartz case leaves me with mixed emotions. You will recall that I had a big copyright infringement case several years ago against a publisher that sold 99 articles of mine to several databases. I sued not just the publisher but ten of their customers. It was an extraordinary and expensive measure that produced results, with the case being settled in my favor for a sum I am not allowed to disclose. I’m not particularly sympathetic towards people who rip off copyrighted material under the theory that information should be free.

But the prosecution of Swartz mystifies me. I asked the U.S Attorney in Los Angeles to take a similar measure on my behalf and spent a couple of hours explaining the multiple infringements of one article on several databases to a FBI agent who claimed to be a CPA and a "cybercrime" expert. They weren’t interested. The FBI said it seemed like a Civil matter to them and that not all laws were enforced. I pointed out what the law is and expressed my disappointment with their lack of action. I said at the time that the Copyright Act only got enforced when there were headlines to be made to show that the FBI and the U.S Attorney were on the job. And that only small fish were ever prosecuted. Never large organizations with political power.

I suspect that was the case here. The offense was too large to ignore. Five million articles seems like a lot, but as someone who publishes that kind of material online and has researched actual database usage by libraries, I can tell you that the losses were minimal. That U.S. Attorney is perfectly correct. Stealing is stealing. But she could have offered the kid a plea deal and been done with it. A big fine would have made the point. Instead she terrified him with the threat of a huge jail sentence. The case had not even gone to trial. So his act was a permanent solution to a temporary problem which could have been negotiated down.

It’s a tragedy. The punishment did not fit the crime. But there is blame on both sides.

Sincerely,

Francis Hamit

I would have thought that even a moderate fine and perhaps thirty days in the clink would have been enough to discourage repetition of Swartz’s crime, while also allowing there to be a trial. Forcing a trial was the point of his action; and a month or two in the clink should be a high enough stake. After all, to the best of my knowledge there has never been any debate of the wisdom of giving this monopoly over reports of publicly funded research to ITHAKA, nor of whether the current costs of public access to publicly owned data can’t be improved. I suspect I could staff such an enterprise for a lot less than JSTOR/ITHAKA charge.

I don’t subscribe to the information ought to be free notion, but I do subscribe to the notion that the public owns what the public has paid for, and that includes publications intended for wide distribution. Yes, there needs to be attention to just what rights the authors of reports of publicly supported research should have. I do note that many academics, paid for from the public purse, owe their promotions and for that matter their tenure to widespread publication and aren’t so much interested in being paid for their writing as in having it cited in other publications.

There is a great debate require here, but it won’t happen if the only way for that to take place is for someone to risk life imprisonment.

And where you see nothing but blame in Swartz, I see some glimmers of heroism. The liberal credo is that intentions matter more than actions; certainly Aaron Swartz meant well – and he caused no one any real harm. The government suppressed a needed debate by making the price of a trial his risking 35 years in jail. Her could have got off lightly if he had pleaded guilty, but what would that have accomplished? We’d still be paying too much for access to publicly owned documents, and paying ITHAKA executives $300,000 a year and more for running this show.

My thanks to all the readers who have written me to assure me that modern cataract operations are fabulously successful, and a great deal less complex while highly effective than was my experience in my youth. I appreciate your concern. I am also happy to report that I don’t need such an operation just yet. although tomorrow they will give me one more exam to be certain.  Thanks to all of you for both the information and the concern.