Aaron Swartz, 26, was a digital rights activist and a hacker at heart. Swartz was found dead on the morning of Jan. 11 in his Brooklyn apartment.
Before you declare this under the category “computer thing — not for me,” I want you to realize one thing: Digital rights are not trivial. Some time or another in your life you will have to come to terms with this. It will affect you and your family. Everything that falls under the umbrella of “human knowledge” is being converted into digital form. Who gets to read what and when is not a trivial question.
Information is going digital. The fundamental problem with this is that copying and distributing digital-media-like documents, images and PDFs is far easier than it is to copy and distribute physical books, articles and papers. The laws that were made for physical media are illogical and even regressive for digital information. Intellectual property needs to change the way it defines infringement. This often leads to the basic question: Should information be free?
Aaron Swartz was under trial, charged with 13 felonies for downloading five million articles from the online journal JSTOR in the fall of 2010 with intent to make them publicly available. All of this was from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology premises. JSTOR is a fee-charging electronic database of journal articles and other intellectual property.
Days before he hanged himself, a deal with the federal prosecutors fell apart. U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann wanted Swartz to plead guilty on all thirteen counts in order to work out a bargain.
Aaron Swartz went from being a computer prodigy to an Internet activist. He was among the founders of Reddit and authored a number of software specifications like the RSS 1.0. He fought from the forefront in preventing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). He founded Demand Progress, an advocacy group focused on internet legislation. Demand Progress continues its work after Swartz.
Here’s the big deal. JSTOR declined to press charges, but the government pursued the case with unusual aggression. It was clear that the government wanted to put an example forward that it will not make digital information free. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts maintained that it needed to protect MIT family’s privacy.
A number of debates are raised by this issue. Firstly, should digital information be free? With the change in the way information is accessed, the laws that govern it must change, too. The reasons that made tangible sources proper for the laws now do not stand. This very quickly turns into a question of intellectual property.
Secondly, why did the government pursue a case in which there were no victims? MIT was among the first academic institutions to make its lectures freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Why did it have to retract its most fundamental principles?
Thirdly and most importantly, was suicide the only way for Swartz? He was an activist. A jail term of thirty years is agreeably nerve-wracking. Yet, whatever he started and helped shape now remains unfulfilled. Maybe he would have been jailed; maybe the community as a whole would have come out and objected to it.
One more man down. How much is it going to take before we as a community see the necessity to discuss digital rights?
