The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Aaron Swartz

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-brilliant-life-and-tragic-death-of-aaron-swartz-20130215

by mecredis • 13 years ago

73 14 13 years ago

rollingstone.com

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

Not to seem callous but does the article really say anything that has not been said before?

michaelwww• 13 years ago

Many in the Rolling Stone audience are reading the details for the first time.

m0th87• 13 years ago

> FEBRUARY 28, 2013

This article is from the future.

duvet• 13 years ago

glad I'm not the only one who noticed this. that really threw me off I had to double check to make sure I hadn't missed some days.

droithomme2• 13 years ago

It's frustrating to see these articles continue to leave out some of the most relevant parts of his work.

According to Ars Technica's interview with Swartz asking why he downloaded the JSTOR documents, he referenced his bio in the Demand Progress statement, which notes that "in conjunction with Shireen Barday, he downloaded and analyzed 441,170 law review articles to determine the source of their funding; the results were published in the Stanford Law Review. From 2010-11, he researched these topics as a Fellow at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/reddit-founder-ar...

Here is the result of his research:

http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/print/article/punitive-dama...

It found that there was extensive corruption in law journal publications which were often commissioned for specific upcoming cases.

That research work led to his position as Harvard Fellow continuing that specific work of analyzing large journal datasets to find corruption. That is why he downloaded the journals - to continue his research into analyzing large datasets to find connections that indicate corruption.

There can be no doubt that many people were unhappy about the corruption in the legal industry which he uncovered using his analysis methods. He was continuing that research on a broader scale, which he plainly indicates in his response to Ars Technica and is substantiated by his biographical, research and publication history.

As a Harvard Fellow, and as a MIT visitor, and as the son of a MIT employee visiting, he has the right to access those articles, and MIT paid for that access to JSTOR, which JSTOR had no legitimate right to withhold from a credentialed researcher with valid access. He only had to circumvent anything because JSTOR implemented access countermeasures which were contrary to their access agreement with MIT. His circumvention was only for the purpose of obtaining the access he was legally entitled to, and thus was valid.

The arguments that he was planing to redistribute articles are completely without merit and are nothing more than propaganda spread by the criminals at the Justice Department who targeted him for destruction because they are corrupt and he was someone who had already revealed systematic corruption in their legal system and published about their corruption in Stanford Law Journal.

GHFigs2• 13 years ago

JSTOR had no legitimate right to withhold from a credentialed researcher with valid access

Did JSTOR or MIT know that's who they were blocking? To my knowledge, he made no effort to contact either party even after it was evident that they were trying to prevent what he was doing. Opinions may differ on whether he should have had to, but if you're going to invoke his credentials, bear in mind that "Gary Host, guy that hid his laptop in a closet after we blocked his access" doesn't carry the same weight as "Aaron Swartz, Harvard Fellow".

gojomo2• 13 years ago

As a matter of common sense, imagine there's someone else, let's call him Bob. Bob has said he agrees with the 'Guerrila Open Access Manifesto'. Bob's written that he believes anyone with access to academic journal articles has the right and the ethical duty to upload them where they can be shared freely. Bob says, if he had such access, he would do his ethical duty.

If we were to then hand Bob some hard drives with the full JSTOR archive, what do you think Bob would do?

It's possible Aaron's interest was his own research, or that of some collaborators. The DoJ may not have been able to prove, to court standards, that he had any intent to distribute. They may not have even been able to prove he authored the 'manifesto'.

Bur we aren't in a court and spin can't help Aaron now. Putting the whole JSTOR archive in torrents would have been consistent with his stated goals, values, and the 'manifesto' call-to-action. (Also, consistent with his earlier writing at http://bits.are.notabug.com.)

The idea he planned to redistribute widely has plenty of merit. The criminal case is over; there's no need to water down Aaron's ideals, just to try to make the prosecutors look worse. The ideals still deserve accurate reporting.

droithomme2• 13 years ago

Ah yes, his one page letter where he says "We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive." In notabug he says child porn should be legalized and he supports the overthrow of the US Government - are you also saying then that he is a child porn user and terrorist since he advocates for both?

I myself share many of his views and more. What does that mean for me though? Here are some examples. I believe US patent law is very dysfunctional, and that copyright privilege has been extended far past the length that they best serve the public good. I agree with Aaron's statement that child porn laws are used to torment people who don't actually harm children. I also find that drug laws are used as a tool of persecution against minority communities, the US engages in terrorist actions against innocent people using drone strikes and targeted assassinations, that there is extensive corruption in the judicial system. I agree that everyone does have the right to republish both papers out of copyright, and those explicitly in the public domain. I agree that it is absurd that the academic journal system is dysfunctional and often takes publicly funded work, for which it has paid the author and researcher nothing, and seizes copyright and places it behind a paywall, which is an abomination.

I am not the only one with these beliefs either, each of them is common enough among the public as to be a normal and reasonable position held by many.

Despite all these beliefs, I have never uploaded copyrighted material to bittorrent other than works I personally own the copyright to. I have never engaged in terrorist action against the government. I have never done illegal drugs. I have never looked at, possessed or transmitted child porn. My positions that certain things that have been criminalized which should not be, and that the law is not working well in some areas, is not evidence whatsoever that I have engaged in any of these acts. You however make the claim that because Swartz advocated "to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive." and because he actually did take public domain legal documents and legally place them in public archives, that this means his analysis of the JSTOR archive was not analysis at all but was to steal the copyrighted material there.

That is an absurd accusation. You might as well accuse him of distributing child porn and being a terrorist, because decriminalizing child porn and overthrowing the government were also things he advocated in his writings. Making the claim that people who see the injustice in US drug laws and call for drug law reform are obviously drug users themselves is a non sequitor argument.

Anechoic2• 13 years ago

Then why not download the articles from his Harvard account?

cma• 13 years ago

He was legally in the right on PACER and got ridiculously harassed over it. Why wouldn't he want to hide his identity when doing it again on JSTOR (where he was still legally in the right).

nnoitra• 13 years ago

Here we go again.

The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Aaron Swartz

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