On 09/30, Pirate Praveen wrote:
Diego Gomez, a Colombian graduate student, currently faces up to eight years in prison for doing something thousands of researchers do every day: posting research results online for those who would not otherwise have a way to access them.
http://news.sciencemag.org/latin-america/2014/07/colombian-grad-student-face...
While I also personally advocate open access for scientific publications, the Columbian student in question in the above article was definitely on the wrong side of the law and should have seen this coming.
It would have been a whole different case had he posted the contents of *his* thesis online (Even that is debatable, but we'll keep it aside for the moment). The fact that he uploaded someone else's thesis which was otherwise guarded by a paywall was essentially an act of piracy. Speaking from a legal perspective, the student violated the copyrights of the original author.
* Of course, some publishers also force you to sign an agreement where you promise not to make your research results publicly available. Such agreements are also legally binding and would result in a similar course of action to anyone who would breach such a contract.
Please sign this petition https://act.eff.org/action/let-s-stand-together-to-promote-open-access-world...
Also we need to have a continuous campaign to make people realize how we are still denied access to knowledge.
Indian Pirates are starting a campaign called "Ekalavya to Aaron Swartz
- access (to knowledge) denied"
https://www.loomio.org/d/igPz5ORr/ekalavya-to-aaron-swartz-access-to-knowled...
Hoping to get all your support. As one concrete step, we should translate Aaron Swartz Guerilla Open Access Manifesto to all Indian languages. http://openaccessmanifesto.org/
Please let me know if you can help with the translation in any language.
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