RIP Aaron Swartz, thank you for everything you did for us in your short life

[Alix Turner]

Aaron Swartz suicide puts internet openness fight in the spotlight

 

[*emmanuelle]

lost the battle with the demons raging inside his head

Demons yes, but also the US Attorney's Office.

 

[[Server Error]]

Attorney Ortiz is and will be on the receiving end of a lot of flak for the next little while if she does not cave into the pressure to resign; dropping all charges against Mr. Swartz a day after he committed suicide won't fix anything.

OTOH, while Mr. Swartz was facing a maximum of 35 years in jail and $1M in fines for downloading and sharing free articles on researches funded by taxpayers' money, the force behind
http://arstechnica.com/security/201...ge-network-may-have-stolen-terabytes-of-data/ is likely state-sponsored, just like Stuxnet, and will never be brought to justice.

 

[marsh12]

I agree that Germany & England are no 1 & 2. Have enjoyed pleasures in both of these cuntries (misspelled deliberately)

??????

 

[PlayfulAlex]

I agree that Germany & England are no 1 & 2. Have enjoyed pleasures in both of these cuntries (misspelled deliberately)

??????

I think you posted your reply in the wrong thread, marsh12...

 

[Sonny]

Hard to go up against the endless resources of the government which is determined to shut you up and to make a statement chilling to others similarly minded to Aaron. Big Brother in the USA wants to keep folks uneducated, uninformed and ignorant. Brave young man versus heavy odds. Let's hope his death spurs on freedom of information and encourages others to defy attempts to control the internet. I don't think the authorities would have anticipated this outcome of his suicide, but they are kind of stupid.

 

[badbadboy]

Such a talented man and such a huge fight he would have had ahead of him. When it comes to Gov't they have bottomless pockets if they want to F**k with you.

 

[Miss*Bijou]

If anyone's interested in more details about this story.. Worth watching.



<iframe width="400" height="225" src="http://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2013/1/14/an_incredible_soul_lawrence_lessig_remembers" frameborder="0"></iframe>




Aaron’s family released this statement:

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.

LAWRENCE LESSIG:

Yeah, Aaron was depressed. He was rationally depressed. You know, he was losing everything, because his government was overreaching in the most ridiculous way to persecute him, not just because of this, but because of what he had done before, liberating government documents that were supposed to be in the public domain. Of course he was depressed. He wasn’t depressed because he had no loving parents—he did have loving parents who did everything they could for him—or because he didn’t have loving friends. Every time you saw Aaron, he was surrounded by five or 10 different people who loved and respected and worked with him. He was depressed because he was increasingly recognizing that the idealism he brought to this fight maybe wasn’t enough. When he saw all of his wealth gone, and he recognized his parents were going to have to mortgage their house so he could afford a lawyer to fight a government that treated him as if he were a 9/11 terrorist, as if what he was doing was threatening the infrastructure of the United States, when he saw that and he recognized how—how incredibly difficult that fight was going to be, of course he was depressed.


Now, you know, I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t know whether there was something wrong with him because of—you know, beyond the rational reason he had to be depressed, but I don’t—I don’t—I don’t have patience for people who want to say, "Oh, this was just a crazy person; this was just a person with a psychological problem who killed himself." No. This was somebody—this was somebody who was pushed to the edge by what I think of as a kind of bullying by our government. A bullying by our government. And just as we hold people responsible when their bullying leads to tragedy, I hope Carmen Ortiz does what MIT did and lead an investigation, ask somebody independent to look at what happened here and explain to America: Is this what the United States government is.

<iframe width="400" height="225" src="http://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2013/1/14/freedom_to_connect_aaron_swartz_1986" frameborder="0"></iframe>

 

[Miss*Bijou]

And btw - Someone else the US is aggressively persecuting (other than the obvious, Bradley Manning), Jeremy Hammond:



<iframe width="400" height="225" src="http://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2012/12/27/the_other_bradley_manning_jeremy_hammond" frameborder="0"></iframe>



Not to mention Wikileaks...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/23/anonymous-trial-wikileaks-internet-freedom

 

[Tugela]

This guy was not a victim, he stole a valuable resource.

JSTOR is a non profit that funds itself through licence fees, which in turn allow users to access the information. The articles they store do not belong to them, they act as distributors for the owners, which are the journals that originally published them. Most of those are non profits as well, and rely on such revenue to continue to operate. Stealing all of their assets and then distributing for free undermines the structure that allows scientists and others to distribute their data to the broader community.

This guy is not a hero, he was a thief, and that is why the government was prosecuting him.

What he did was very serious, a crime against knowledge and the act of an anarchist.

 

[Miss*Bijou]

This guy was not a victim, he stole a valuable resource.

JSTOR is a non profit that funds itself through licence fees, which in turn allow users to access the information. The articles they store do not belong to them, they act as distributors for the owners, which are the journals that originally published them. Most of those are non profits as well, and rely on such revenue to continue to operate. Stealing all of their assets and then distributing for free undermines the structure that allows scientists and others to distribute their data to the broader community.

This guy is not a hero, he was a thief, and that is why the government was prosecuting him.

What he did was very serious, a crime against knowledge and the act of an anarchist.

Oh God, you've got to be kidding me.

First of all, his accomplishments have nothing to do with the Jstor issue so I don't know why you judge his whole life and character based on what you think about that issue alone, when obviously you haven't bothered to first find out the anything about his actual accomplishments!

Second of all, Jstor themselves declined to pursue legal action against him. Not only that, they are now going to be making those papers available to the public for free anyway (which you would have found out if you'd bothered to watch the first video I posted).

Third, you cannot possibly or seriously suggest that a potential 30 years sentence, millions in fines, millions in lawyer fees and being caught up in this legal charade for several years was in any way proportionate to the alleged crime - ESPECIALLY considering this kind of motivation to prosecute by the US would have been far better spent on all those Wall Street thieves who actually did steal money, a hell of a lot of it, from people who were truly harmed and had their lives destroyed. That's not mentioning the failure to prosecute any of those in power at the time who were responsible for torture - a war crimes according to International law. And the list could go on and would be very long.

There's no possible way to justify the government's zealous attitude towards someone who downloaded (didn't even distribute) copyrighted papers when the copyright owners actually DECLINE to press any criminal charges when the will to pursue ANY actions AT ALL for vastly more serious crimes, with real damage, real harm, real victims is inexistant.

The absurdity of the government's priorities is so immense its just obscene! You have to be kidding me because that is complete nonsense!


And finally, while you obviously believe in traditional copyright remaining as rigid, i dont believe it is an option anymore and definitely not that simple anymore. I think it is a completely futile exercise to try to police and control the sharing of knowledge and information on the internet in traditional ways and to expect traditional copyright laws to be adequate or appropriate in the age of the internet. It's delusional to expect that actually. Of course companies or institutions are going to resist any change and are going to fight hard for the status quo because it benefits them to keep things the way they are. The reality however, is that no matter how hard they try or how much they want it, things are *not* the same and the internet *has* changed the way we do things, the way we share information, knowledge, art -everything. The reality is that the internet has changed the way we think about these things and about sharing.


<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/6973160" width="300" height="218" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>


http://www.arl.org/sparc/openaccess/

JSTOR expressed deep condolences to the Swartz family and maintained the case had been instigated by the U.S. attorney’s office. They wrote, quote, "The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset, since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge. At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content. To that end, Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011."

AARON SWARTZ:
By virtue of being students at a major U.S. university, I assume that you have access to a wide variety of scholarly journals. Pretty much every major university in the United States pays these sort of licensing fees to organizations like JSTOR and Thomson and ISI to get access to scholarly journals that the rest of the world can’t read. And these licensing fees are substantial. And they’re so substantial that people who are studying in India, instead of studying in the United States, don’t have this kind of access. They’re locked out from all of these journals. They’re locked out from our entire scientific legacy. I mean, a lot of these journal articles, they go back to the Enlightenment. Every time someone has written down a scientific paper, it’s been scanned and digitized and put in these collections.

That is a legacy that has been brought to us by the history of people doing interesting work, the history of scientists. It’s a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people, but instead it’s been locked up and put online by a handful of for-profit corporations who then try and get the maximum profit they can out of it. Now, there are people, good people, trying to change this with the open access movement. So, all journals, going forward, they’re encouraging them to publish their work as open access, so open on the Internet, available for download by everybody, available for free copying, and perhaps even modification with attribution and notice.

LAWRENCE LESSIG
I received an email from JSTOR four days before Aaron died, from the president of JSTOR, announcing, celebrating that JSTOR was going to release all of these journal articles to anybody around the world who wanted access—exactly what Aaron was fighting for.

 

[HankQuinlan]

This guy was not a victim, he stole a valuable resource.

JSTOR is a non profit that funds itself through licence fees, which in turn allow users to access the information. The articles they store do not belong to them, they act as distributors for the owners, which are the journals that originally published them. Most of those are non profits as well, and rely on such revenue to continue to operate. Stealing all of their assets and then distributing for free undermines the structure that allows scientists and others to distribute their data to the broader community.

This guy is not a hero, he was a thief, and that is why the government was prosecuting him.

What he did was very serious, a crime against knowledge and the act of an anarchist.

I, of course, assume that you (or any person in your house) has never downloaded an illegal mp3 or watched a pirated movie.....and that if you were caught doing so, you would happily take the huge fines and/or jail terms on the books in the US for doing so.

You also wouldn't whine that you were being punished far greater than violent criminals (or, as Ms. Bijou pointed out) than the white collar criminals who plundered billions from the rest of us and have been rewarded with federal appointments and even more cash rewards for their demonstrably criminal actions.

You are far better man than the rest of us.

 

[Tugela]

Oh God, you've got to be kidding me.

First of all, his accomplishments have nothing to do with the Jstor issue so I don't know why you judge his whole life and character based on what you think about that issue alone, when obviously you haven't bothered to first find out the anything about his actual accomplishments!

Second of all, Jstor themselves declined to pursue legal action against him. Not only that, they are now going to be making those papers available to the public for free anyway (which you would have found out if you'd bothered to watch the first video I posted).

Third, you cannot possibly or seriously suggest that a potential 30 years sentence, millions in fines, millions in lawyer fees and being caught up in this legal charade for several years was in any way proportionate to the alleged crime - ESPECIALLY considering this kind of motivation to prosecute by the US would have been far better spent on all those Wall Street thieves who actually did steal money, a hell of a lot of it, from people who were truly harmed and had their lives destroyed. That's not mentioning the failure to prosecute any of those in power at the time who were responsible for torture - a war crimes according to International law. And the list could go on and would be very long.

There's no possible way to justify the government's zealous attitude towards someone who downloaded (didn't even distribute) copyrighted papers when the copyright owners actually DECLINE to press any criminal charges when the will to pursue ANY actions AT ALL for vastly more serious crimes, with real damage, real harm, real victims is inexistant.

The absurdity of the government's priorities is so immense its just obscene! You have to be kidding me because that is complete nonsense!


And finally, while you obviously believe in traditional copyright remaining as rigid, i dont believe it is an option anymore and definitely not that simple anymore. I think it is a completely futile exercise to try to police and control the sharing of knowledge and information on the internet in traditional ways and to expect traditional copyright laws to be adequate or appropriate in the age of the internet. It's delusional to expect that actually. Of course companies or institutions are going to resist any change and are going to fight hard for the status quo because it benefits them to keep things the way they are. The reality however, is that no matter how hard they try or how much they want it, things are *not* the same and the internet *has* changed the way we do things, the way we share information, knowledge, art -everything. The reality is that the internet has changed the way we think about these things and about sharing.


<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/6973160" width="300" height="218" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>


http://www.arl.org/sparc/openaccess/

First of all, you don't need the victim's cooperation for a crime to be a crime. If there is sufficient evidence the prosecutor can continue even if the victim does not cooperate. The reason for that is that the crime is against society, not specifically the victim. That was the situation in this case. What JSTOR did or wanted was irrelevant. Btw, JSTOR is an online library, they do not actually own the material they store, the copyright holders do.

Secondly, distribution of knowledge proceeds overwhelmingly through journals. This is how it is done. There are a few "free" online journals, but they are almost allways fringe and are filled with stuff that is trivial at best and dubious at worst. The bulk of new knowledge goes into journals that were traditionally print, but nowdays are moving to electronic formats. Production of these journals is not free, they cost money for staff to do typesetting, editing and to run the review process. Not to mention printing for the hard copy versions. All of this costs real money, and that money has to come from somewhere. Journals get this from subscriptions and license fees from institutions. That is how they pay for everything. Some journals require authors to pay page fees to publish, but that in most cases costs are recovered through subscriptions.

There are some journals which are run as for profit business (most of which retain control of their data themselves - probably most of those were not in JSTOR anyway), but most are non-profits either independently, or affiliated to some scientific organization.

What Swartz was doing was undermining the funding for the distribution of knowledge. This is an irresponsible, fundamental and massive attack on one of the pillars of knowledge itself. He may have been too stupid or too ignorant to appreciate the potential damage he was going to inflict, that is not an excuse. This was so serious that an example had to be made, that is what the prosecutor understood and was doing.

Access to published work in the third world is available through interlibary loans and special dispensations to recognize local economic conditions. Plus, there is the time honored method of simply contacting the authors and asking for a copy. So, citing the third world is just a cop out and an attempt to excuse his behaviour.

Contary to what Lessig claims, the information JSTOR recently opened up was a subset of the total collection, mostly comprised of very old work, that was slated to be made freely available but had not yet been done so. It is actually only a small part of the collection, and a part few people other than historians are interested in.

 

[Tugela]

I, of course, assume that you (or any person in your house) has never downloaded an illegal mp3 or watched a pirated movie.....and that if you were caught doing so, you would happily take the huge fines and/or jail terms on the books in the US for doing so.

You also wouldn't whine that you were being punished far greater than violent criminals (or, as Ms. Bijou pointed out) than the white collar criminals who plundered billions from the rest of us and have been rewarded with federal appointments and even more cash rewards for their demonstrably criminal actions.

You are far better man than the rest of us.

This is not downloading a few movies or song, this was massive organized theft. And he wasn't simply copying material, he allegedly misused university equipment to do it with the apparent intent of establishing an alternate illegal distribution system, so there is no way that this is in the same category.

 

[InnocentBoy]

I wonder whos tax dollars go to said university. Knowledge belongs to the people.

 

[Tugela]

The publications belonged to the journals that publish them. They don't get taxpayer money.

If Swartz had been successfull in his attempts to destroy the base for publication, NOONE would be publishing results and it would ALL become secret.

Most Universities subscribe to that Database anyway, so anyone who wanted to read this stuff simply could log in to their local University library.

So that was not his objective. That is what he said it was, but if he really believed that he was either ignorant about how the system works or just plain stupid. He wasn't enabling anyone reading all this stuff, all he was doing was damaging the ability of journals to publish. More likely he was looking for a further 15 minutes of infamy in the belief that no one would do anything about his anarchistic behaviour. But, it turned out he was wrong, and this time someone WAS prepared to do something about it.