Ripples were sent through the Internet community on January 11 when Internet freedom activist, Aaron Swartz, committed suicide in his Brooklyn apartment. Swartz was well known for his role in founding Demand Progress and his substantial efforts in developing the RSS 1.0 specification and Reddit.
Swartz was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1986, the son of a software company founder. From an early age, he surrounded himself in studying the Internet and computers, and in his preteens he started theinfo.org, which he set up to share public records from US courts. At 14, he was working on the RSS 1.0 specification with World Wide Web creator, Tim Berners-Lee. He attended Stanford University, but left after a year to found Infogami, a Y Combinator funded software company making a wiki platform. He later merged with Reddit while it was in its infancy and after it gained popularity, the site was bought a year later by Condé Nast Publications, who managed Wired, The New Yorker, and Vogue among other publications. Reddit moved to San Francisco and worked in the Wired News offices, but Swartz was unhappy with office life and his situation and was asked to resign shortly after taking a long Christmas vacation.
He was very active as a Wikipedia editor, and in 2006 he ran for the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Directors. A major proponent of his bid was a study showing that, contrary to what Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, and others had claimed, Wikipedia was primarily written by millions of casual or even unregistered users that would write paragraphs at a time, while the core network of editors would do the spelling and grammar fixes and other minor changes. While he was unsuccessful in his electoral bid, he was able to present an alternative view on how one of the world’s largest encyclopedias operates. He was also able to help develop the Creative Commons licensing system, which is a more open way to license content to others than the traditional copyrighting while still allowing some recognition or control past the public domain.
The part of his life that his family and friends have claimed is most responsible for contributing to his death concerns approximately four million articles he downloaded over MIT’s network from JSTOR, a digital library founded in 1995 which provides searches for over a thousand journals. The U.S. government and other government agencies brought a lengthy court case against Swartz, charging him for hacking into MIT’s network and JSTOR’s database. After pleading not guilty to all charges and his release on $100 000 unsecured bail, JSTOR dropped their litigation against him since he returned the documents he had downloaded to them, which they claimed was their primary concern. MIT kept a neutral position throughout the proceedings, and the U.S. legal bodies asserting the trial that was to begin this year charged him with a potential 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines. Faced with depression and life-altering punishments, Swartz was found by his girlfriend in his apartment with no suicide note found.
Some discussion has sprung after his death concerning the ethical nature of having publicly-funded research locked behind closed access journals that require subscriptions to access, and some academics have acknowledged his role in knowledge liberation by posting free PDF versions of their research online in honor of his memory. Shortly after his death, a group of archivists set up a website where users could liberate public domain articles from JSTOR’s archive by making use of a new feature on JSTOR’s website which allows people to read three articles for free every two weeks. The site, called Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR Liberator, allows users to engage in a small acts of civil disobedience by re-uploading the PDF to a separate, open-access archive even though the JSTOR terms of service state that the articles should not be shared with other individuals after being downloaded.
Other discussion has focused on the draconian laws surrounding computer usage laws from before the Internet’s mass-usage, particularly on the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that was used as the primary weapon against Aaron in the government’s trial. Representatives on both sides of the political spectrum have introduced debate on the harmful effects of these laws and have suggested major changes should be made to ensure that government bullying such as that used in Swartz’s trial is minimized in future trials.
Swartz unfortunately did not have the time to make the change he wanted to, but his dedicated efforts on political activism later in life, primarily through his activist organization, Demand Progress, were instrumental in helping raise awareness for legislation like the Stop Online Privacy Act, which was a great controversy last year that eventually was postponed due to the mass negative attention brought to it by organizations like his. His death was tragic, yet it has done a great deal in bringing discussion on openness, unfair government control, and Internet rights to the masses. The debate brought about in his memory could bring significant changes to the way people and legislators view the Internet and their freedoms, and the best way to honour his memory would be supporting these arguments over social media, in discussions with others, and on your ballot when you pick the next MPs. If they are not able to fully understand the intricacies of the Internet and technology, what makes them qualified to legislate it?
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