It turns out that Tufte developed the content for "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" while at Princeton.
Although he did self-publish the book later at his own (considerable) expense, where do you think the money Princeton paid him all those years came from?
If you consistently apply Swartz's idea here, Tufte is in the wrong for charging for work that taxpayers helped fund. But I have a different take: Swartz's idea is bogus.
"In 1975, while at Princeton, Tufte was asked to teach a statistics course to a group of journalists who were visiting the school to study economics. He developed a set of readings and lectures on statistical graphics, which he further developed in joint seminars he subsequently taught with renowned statistician John Tukey, a pioneer in the field of information design. These course materials became the foundation for his first book on information design, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.[5][6]
After difficult negotiations with mainline publishers failed, Tufte decided to self-publish Visual Display in 1982, working closely with graphic designer Howard Gralla. He financed the work by taking out a second mortgage on his home. The book quickly became a commercial success and secured his transition from political scientist to information expert.[5]"
It is worth noting that the situation described -- trouble with publishers, needing to take out a second mortgage to publish the book, etc. -- need not happen in today's world. We have the software to format books on even the cheapest computers, and the infrastructure to distribute books to the entire world at no cost to the author (one can find a free Wifi connection even in small towns). All that is needed is time, and in the case of academic publishing (textbooks, research articles, course notes, etc.) that time is already paid for by other means.
Does coursework at a privately-funded institution count as publicly-funded research? Let's pretend that Princeton is a government institution: if someone uses his own salary, from the government's payroll, to develop and self-publish a book, that work belongs to the government? Did Tufte's mortgage belong to the government (or Princeton, in this case), too?
Of course not. That's my entire point: given today's mixed economy, when public money is used to aid the creation of a thing, it does not mean that the resulting work ought to belong to the public, contracts and agreements be damned.
Swartz obviously did not agree with that, or he would not have committed those crimes against JSTOR and MIT.
(By the way, the "private" universities, Princeton included, are only nominally private, and it's been that way for a long time. I think that should change: there ought to be a full separation of state and education.)
Today's economy is not really relevant to something that happened in 1975. Things have greatly changed since then, particularly when it comes to the dissemination of human knowledge. In today's world, a book can be published at no cost over the Internet. Scholarly articles, course notes, recordings of course lectures, and all the other methods of communicating knowledge can all be done rapidly, cheaply, and on a global scale using the Internet.
"it does not mean that the resulting work ought to belong to the public"
As Thomas Jefferson put it, "The field of knowledge is the common property of mankind." The idea that a person's knowledge should be hidden behind paywalls, or that it should collect dust on the bookshelves of a university library, should be considered disgusting in today's world. Copyright only ever made sense when it came to academic publishing as a way to promote the publishing industry, because at one time the publishing industry was the most effective system for spreading knowledge (ironically, copyright started in England out of an attempt to censor the publishing industry). The moment we created a better system -- the Internet -- we should have reevaluated the application of copyright to academic publishing, and rewrote the law to promote the use of the Internet over the publishing industry.
Instead, what we have today is a bizarre situation: the publishing industry has more power than ever before under copyright law, and the Internet is being used to further restrict access to knowledge. Publishers are using copyrights and abusing the Internet as a way to attack the used book market, and even to avoid actually publishing journals (why do we even bother with the publishing industry if they do not actually publish things?). The moral issue here is not whether or not human knowledge should be shared online, but whether or not the academic publishing industry should even be a player anymore.
"crimes against JSTOR and MIT"
That the word "crime" is even mentioned in the context of what Aaron did is a sign that our legal system has become completely disconnected from serving the interests of society. The law apparently considers the protection of the revenue stream of an anachronistic publishing industry to be of greater value than improving access to knowledge. I suppose you might say that people should just pay up or travel to the nearest university library -- and if they cannot afford to pay and cannot afford the travel costs, too bad (after all, if they wanted to be educated, why are they so poor?).
Aaron was doing his civic duty by breaking bad laws; more people should follow his example.
"The idea that a person's knowledge should be hidden behind paywalls"
A person's knowledge is the result of his own mental and physical effort. The rest of the world, no matter their number, has no right to dictate that he shares his knowledge, nor do they have the right to dictate the terms that he proposes. This is because he has a right to his life. Anything less than that is slavery.
Morally speaking, a man does not owe another man a basket of picked cotton just because he happens to be black. In the same way, one man does not owe another man money, a job, a scientific article, or a movie just because he happens to be able. Need is not a valid claim on anyone's life.
> A person's knowledge is the result of his own mental and physical effort.
A person's knowledge hasn't been the result of his own mental and physical effort since the stone age, and probably earlier. We all gain our knowledge by studying the words of those before us, and then we may be able to contribute a tiny piece to that giant interlocking puzzle ourselves.
The 'ownership' of those new pieces now belongs to publishing houses that themselves did not contribute to the knowledge.
Restricting the free flow of knowledge is unethical.
"The rest of the world, no matter their number, has no right to dictate that he shares his knowledge"
Perhaps not, but why should I be allowed to dictate to you what you are allowed to do with knowledge that I impart to you? Put another way, if I publish a paper describing knowledge I have developed, why shouldn't anyone who receives that paper be permitted to spread that knowledge further -- and if so, why not by simply giving copies of the paper to others?
"Anything less than that is slavery."
I think perhaps you missed part of the definition of slavery:
Did anyone say that anything about forcing someone to work? Did anyone say anything about not paying someone for their work, if that person demands payment? No, nobody is talking about that. What we are talking about is what we can do with the products of a person's work once those products have been made available to us.
Almost all the scientific papers that are published today are written by people who are paid to do research and to share the results of their research with others. Very few scientific articles are written by unpaid volunteers (even grad students typically receive some compensation for their time). This is not a question of paying for research, because research is already paid for and would continue to be paid for in the absence of the publishing industry. If a researcher does not want other people to read the articles he writes, he can refuse to publish -- he can take his secrets to his grave.
Copyrights are not and have never been a natural right. Copyright, as applied to academic publishing, has only ever been a system for promoting the dissemination of knowledge by monetizing a publishing industry. Researchers routinely assign their copyrights to publishers when they publish articles, losing whatever claim they had to preventing copies of the work from being made. We no longer need publishers to spread knowledge across our nation because we have a better system, the Internet, and therefore copyrights on academic work have outlived their usefulness.
The comparison to slavery is pedantic and misleading. Slaves do not have a legal option to not do as commanded by their masters; in a world without copyrights on academic work, researchers would have a legal option, which is not publishing their work.
"In the same way, one man does not owe another man money, a job, a scientific article, or a movie just because he happens to be able"
Which is fine: you are free to not publish your work. You will probably not get very far as a career researcher if you refuse to publish, but that is your problem and not mine. It is not really society's problem either, because there is no shortage of researchers who willingly publish their work, nor is there any shortage of researchers who will willingly publish their work in the absence of copyrights. Ayn Rand's notion that copyrights are a necessary function of government was absurdly misguided, but we can forgive her because as an author she profited from copyright (unlike researchers, who rarely profit from copyrights on their knowledge). Copyrights are a means to an end, and in the age of the Internet, copyrights on academic works have completely outlived their usefulness.
Your right to not teach others what you know is not in question here; rather, the question is whether or not I can teach others something you taught me. Considering that human civilization exists because we have spent generations passing knowledge along and it was only very recently that we even considered forbidding people from spreading knowledge, I would think that there is no real moral dilemma there and that the answer to the question should be obvious.
Although he did self-publish the book later at his own (considerable) expense, where do you think the money Princeton paid him all those years came from?
If you consistently apply Swartz's idea here, Tufte is in the wrong for charging for work that taxpayers helped fund. But I have a different take: Swartz's idea is bogus.
"In 1975, while at Princeton, Tufte was asked to teach a statistics course to a group of journalists who were visiting the school to study economics. He developed a set of readings and lectures on statistical graphics, which he further developed in joint seminars he subsequently taught with renowned statistician John Tukey, a pioneer in the field of information design. These course materials became the foundation for his first book on information design, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.[5][6]
After difficult negotiations with mainline publishers failed, Tufte decided to self-publish Visual Display in 1982, working closely with graphic designer Howard Gralla. He financed the work by taking out a second mortgage on his home. The book quickly became a commercial success and secured his transition from political scientist to information expert.[5]"
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte