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Message: 1 Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2013 16:42:15 +1100 From: Bree Blakeman Subject: [AASNet] Knowledge, publishing, copyright and violence. To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]> Message-ID: <[log in to unmask]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Vale Aaron Swartz. Aaron was a well known activist who fought to make online content free to the public. He co-founded 'Reddit' and the political organisation 'Demand Progress,' which campaigns against internet censorship. He took his own life yesterday. He was 26. Swartz was facing up to 35 years in jail for downloading the JSTOR archive of about 4.8 million documents. His federal trial was to begin next month. According to a federal indictment, 'Swartz stole the documents from JSTOR, a subscription service used by MIT that offers digitized copies of articles from academic journals. Prosecutors said he intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites.' He faced 13 felony charges, including breaching site terms and intending to share downloaded files through peer-to-peer networks, computer fraud, wire fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture. =========================================================== "Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn't an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn't done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out. Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who'd tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail. This morning, a lot of people are speculating that Aaron killed himself because he was worried about doing time. That might be so. Imprisonment is one of my most visceral terrors, and it's at least credible that fear of losing his liberty, of being subjected to violence (and perhaps sexual violence) in prison, was what drove Aaron to take this step." =========================================================== Rest in Peace, gumurr djarrark. 'RIP, Aaron Swartz': http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html 'Prosecutor As Bully': http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully