Friends and allies of Aaron Swartz charge that overzealous prosecutors and draconian intellectual property laws drove the promising young hacker to take his own life on Friday.
Aaron accomplished more in his 26 years than most of us will accomplish in our lifetimes. At the age of 14, he helped develop the RSS standard. He was an early member of the team that created reddit, which was sold to Condé Nast… before Aaron turned 20. Now independently wealthy, Aaron threw himself into political activism.
Swartz took up the flame of copyright reform and became a leader in the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) last year.
He turned hacker, and that's what led to his downfall. After breaking the paywall on PACER, the website the US judiciary uses to distribute public court records, Swartz focused on JSTOR, an electronic library of academic papers. He downloaded massive quantities of papers from the JSTOR database by accessing the MIT network using a laptop hidden in a network closet.
The action was "inconsiderate," equivalent to paying by check at the grocery store while other people are waiting behind you in line, according to Alex Stamos, CTO of Artemis Internet, who had planned to testify as an expert witness in Swartz's defense at the trial. But federal prosecutors disagreed. They charged him with multiple counts of computer hacking, wire fraud, and other crimes. If convicted on all charges, Swartz could have spent decades in prison.
Depression and suicide are complex problems. Blogger Charlie Lloyd cautioned against fitting the suicide into a narrative, such as, "It's the compassionate genius who was a little too good, or the activist hounded down by the government, or why would such a promising and beloved young person do something like this, or gosh there seems to be a link between creativity and mental illness, or some other well-meaning script."
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. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.
I don't have a lot to add to the outpouring of grief and outrage sweeping the Internet. I agree that depression and suicide are complex problems, and we don't know whether prosecutors drove Swartz to suicide.
On the other hand, the prospect of occupying a prison cell into middle age certainly would not have improved Swartz's mental state.
And intellectual property laws in the US are a national shame. From their original, beneficial roots as a means of encouraging creative work, intellectual property law has become a machine designed to allow businesses to continue making money long past the point of reasonableness, while hounding people with punishments disproportionate to the actual damage they committed. Hopefully, heightened awareness brought on by Swartz's suicide will drive necessary legal reforms.
...there should be a massive exodus from the copyright-locked journals to more open publishers, but for some reason the business models for open journals haven't caught on the right mix yet.
The problem, which lies at the heart of this racket, is not that researchers can't publish in "open journals," on websites, or wherever they like. Some do. But colleges only recognize publications in certain, designated journals as counting towards tenure.
I understand that peer review is vital, but it's not a sufficient excuse for the status quo.
I think that's a tradegy of a person who lives " out of the system". Though on the first sight it looks, that it's easier to be different now, but it's doubtful. It's easier to be different in the frames that goverment defines- for those whose behavior is dangerous from the "system's point of view"- the punishment is too severe.The Matrix has no mercy.
@mhhfive - not sure that any healthcare system can make depression disappear. Drugs can take the edge off, but they don't eradicate depression. If you take the right antibiotics, you can clear up an infection. Not so with depression.
If someone is looking at decades in a federal pen, enormous fines and legal fees, I don't think there are any medical treatments that could make them feel good about their future.
Aaron Swartz will be accuately missed on the internet. Hopefully, our healthcare system will be able to better address the needs of depression and avert more cases where people can be pushed over the edge.
The academic journal publishing industry is really crazy -- what other industry has its main product subsidized by the government and then also protected by copyright? Disney would LOVE to be able to sit on these knowledge archives that are largely paid-for by NIH/DOE/etc research grants and academic insitutions.
It's a wonder that PLOS journals aren't more popular with academics... there should be a massive exodus from the copyright-locked journals to more open publishers, but for some reason the business models for open journals haven't caught on the right mix yet.
Not to digress too far from the subject of Swartz's loss, but this academic publishing racket really is scandalous.
I was reminded of an article I found a few months ago on JSTOR. It was published in 1965. The author, who almost certainly made no money from it in the first place (academic journal), is dead. The journal in which it appeared has ceased publication. JSTOR would like to charge me $10 to download it.
Innovation requires a free exchange of ideas. Systems like academic publishing and JSTOR that attempt to firewall that information stifle innovation and progress.
There are many things to be sad and disappointed about in this case. The saddest is obviously the loss of Aaron Swartz, a brilliant mind who could have contributed so much to society. I forgot where I saw the headline, but apparently, hackers are getting sentences that are harsher than what rapists are slapped with. That's already alarming as it is; and if you look at the situation and the system of scientific publications that Kim outlined, you'd agree that they were way too hard (and unnecessarily so) on Aaron.
I'd like to add a little bit about academic journals, which I've criticized here before as an absurdly anachronistic bastion of the publishing industry. I called it a "racket."
Academic researchers do not publish papers for commercial gain (for research funding, sure, but that's not the same thing). They do so to increase the store of human knowledge. Many -- perhaps most -- researchers would be happy to share results freely, especially now that the Internet provides such a convenient forum.
However, in order to secure or maintain tenure, academics are expected to publish regularly in designated journals. Nobody buys these journals except the libraries of the colleges granting tenure. The journals are hugely expensive. Since libraries started running out of room to store this landfill, JSTOR has become the go-to repository.
In order to maintain the revenue for publishes, JSTOR--itself a non-profit--charges for access to these journals.
It's tragic that anyone should be persecuted for undermining this ridiculous system.
70 years ago, Richard Feynman habitually picked locks at Los Alamos while part of the nuclear research program there. Like Swartz, he was trying to point out institutional failures; unlike Swartz, Feyman was tolerated and later went on to become one of the most brlliant scientists of the 20th Century. I fear we're losing that spirit of innovation and our humanity too.
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