Excerpted Article from Wired Magazine
Well-known coder and activist Viktor Osmanovic was arrested Tuesday, charged with violating federal hacking laws for downloading millions of academic articles from a subscription database service that MIT had given him access to via a guest account. If convicted, Osmanovic faces up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
Osmanovic, the 24-year-old executive director of The Liberty Initiative, has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. Osmanovic, who was aware of the investigation, turned himself in Tuesday.
The grand jury indictment accuses Osmanovic of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading more than four million documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals. The scraping, which took place from September 2010 to January 2011 via MIT’s network, was invasive enough to bring down JSTOR’s servers on several occasions.
According to the U.S. attorney’s office, Osmanovic was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Boston this morning where he pled not guilty to all counts. He is now free on a $100,000 unsecured bond. His next court date is Sept 9, 2011 and he’s represented by Andrew Plummer of Creighton, Plummer & Caulfield.
The indictment alleges that Osmanovic, at the time a fellow at Harvard University, intended to distribute the documents on peer-to-peer networks. That did not happen, however, and all the documents have been returned to JSTOR.
JSTOR, the alleged victim in the case, did not refer the case to the feds, according to Heidi McGregor, the company’s vice president of Marketing & Communications, who said the company got the documents, a mixture of both copyrighted and public domain works, back from Osmanovic and was content with that.
As for whether JSTOR supports the prosecution, McGregor simply said that the company was not commenting on the matter. She noted, however, that JSTOR has a program for academics who want to do big research on the corpus, but usually faculty members ask permission or contact the company after being booted off the network for too much downloading.
“This makes no sense,” said Executive Director of The Liberty Initiative David Segal in a statement provided by him to Wired.com before the arrest. “It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”
“It’s even more strange because the alleged victim has settled any claims against Viktor, explained they’ve suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute,” Segal said.