A martyr to openness
Few of us have not been touched in some way by the work of Aaron Swartz. The software-programming prodigy, who hanged himself last week at the age of 26, invented the widely used electronic syndication tool RSS, and helped to build two of the Internet’s most popular websites, Wikipedia and Reddit.
In death, he has become a martyr for the cause of copyright reform.
At the time of his suicide, Swartz was being prosecuted by U.S. federal authorities in Boston for illegally downloading millions of academic articles — a crime for which he faced up to 35 years in jail and $1 million in fines. Since his death, his family and supporters have blamed what they see as an overzealous prosecution for exacerbating his longstanding depression and, ultimately, taking his life. In a statement, his family said Swartz’s suicide was “the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”
Swartz’s crime was an extension of his life’s work: to promote the open, democratic values of the Internet — a mission that put him at odds with a government trying to figure out how to protect copyright in the digital age. After the sale of Reddit made Swartz a wealthy man at 19, he dedicated himself full-time to activism, most notably leading the successful opposition to the regressive Stop Online Piracy Act.
Federal prosecutors absurdly claimed that Swartz had intended to sell the academic articles he had stolen. But as Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, Swartz’s friend and mentor, pointed out in a blog post last week: “Anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of academic articles is either an idiot or a liar.”
Swartz’s own story is more plausible. He was attempting to “liberate” the articles from behind a paywall, he said, because he believed that knowledge, especially knowledge that had been paid for in part by the government, belongs to everyone. At worst it’s a naive idea, recklessly pursued; it hardly made him a felon. Perhaps that’s why JSTOR, the owner of the articles, dropped its charges against Swartz before his death and encouraged the U.S. government to do the same.
Swartz’s suicide has laid bare a tension between the traditional understanding of copyright and the values embedded in the Internet and espoused by those, like Swartz, who helped to build it. The disproportionate prosecution of so-called hacktivists suggests the U.S. government is not ready to grapple with that tension in good faith. It ought to get ready: the Internet wunderkind could be bullied away, but what he represented cannot.
Aaron Swartz’s family and supporters have blamed his suicide on overzealous prosecution on hacking charges