Is it wrong to horde knowledge behind a paywall?
Aaron Swartz, the wunderkind who played a substantial part in programming digital services like RSS, Creative Commons, and Reddit, certainly thought so. He spent his life campaigning for unrestricted access to information; a life that would be tragically cut short when he crossed a dangerous line.
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To call Aaron Swartz a prodigy almost seems an understatement. Born in Chicago, Illinois, Swartz taught himself to read at the age of three. With this skill came a propensity for understanding. Much to the chagrin of many of the adults in his life, Swartz was always asking “how?” or “why?”. He desired to learn how the world worked, and he found a means of doing so through the internet.
His father had founded the software firm Mark Williams Company, allowing Swartz to study computer systems, programming, and the internet from an early age. His first major project was Info Network, a user-generated encyclopedia developed three years before Wikipedia. At the time of launch, Swartz was only 12 years old. The website saw him place in the second annual ArsDigita Prize, an award sponsored by revered computer scientist Philip Greenspun.
He studied at a private school until the 9th grade, until deciding to take courses at a local college. At the same time, he joined a team of programmers working on the RSS 1.0 web syndication software, which remains in use today.
Over the next two years, Swartz would co-author a range of web tools, but had come to foster a passion for projects that inspired and aided free communication of ideas and knowledge across the net. So it was that he joined Creative Commons, a non-profit developing copyright licenses that allowed content creators to retain or waive certain rights for the sake of sharing their work online. The project was founded in 2001, and in January 2016 it was estimated that 1.1 billion pieces of work had been released around the world under Creative Commons licenses.
Creative Commons’ founder, Lawrence Lessig, became a close friend and mentor to Swartz. “..his work was dedicated solely to making the world a better place for the ideas that he had…He was an idealist who believed we had to live up to something better,” he told Democracy Now!
Soon after, Swartz headed for California to enrol at Stanford University. Expecting to enter a hive of eager young minds, Swartz was disappointed to find himself uninspired by tertiary academia. “I could say, and it would be true, that it’s nice here, the teachers are energetic and hard-working, the classes seem promising, etc. But that’s not interesting to me and I can’t really make it interesting for you,” he wrote on his blog.
Swartz caused ripples in the school when he wrote a paper about the connection between research funding and consequent bias, but dropped out after a disenchanting year.
He joined Y Combinator, an incubator for emerging internet talent. Here he designed content management system Infogami, and created a new web application framework called web.py. He used web.py to rewrite the codebase of another Y Combinator project, Reddit. Swartz joined the team full-time in 2005 when Infogami failed to secure additional funding, and over the next year Reddit began to grow, eventually becoming an open source project. Swartz himself released web.py for unrestricted use on the platform.
During this period, he slept in a cupboard.
Publisher Condé Nast acquired Not a Bug – the firm that had been founded upon the merging of Infogami and Reddit – in late 2006, and moved the team to San Francisco. Swartz was not fond of office life, and he didn’t hide that fact. Eventually, he was fired.
While volunteering as an editor for Wikipedia, Swartz wrote an analysis of the site entitled Who Writes Wikipedia? The landmark article declared “the formatters aid the contributors, not the other way around” – in direct contrast to the views of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales – and shed a whole new light on the process.
That same year, Swartz made the first of many major political reactions to what he considered the overly restricted distribution of intellectual content by acquiring and publishing the entirety of the Library of Congress’s bibliographic dataset. The library charged a fee to those who wished to access the information, but because these documents originated from government sources, they were not copyright-protected. Swartz released them all online for free, with the approval of the national copyright office. The Open Library can be accessed here.
By 2008, Swartz had become an eager activist.
He launched Watchdog.net, a site that aggregated data on US politicians, published the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, and established the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “”I spend my days experimenting with new ways to get progressive policies enacted and progressive politicians elected.”
Swartz also downloaded 2.7 million federal court documents from the United State Courts’ PACER database. The FBI moved to investigate, but no charges were laid. Still, he had their attention.
Undoubtedly, Swartz’s most notable campaign saw him resolve to bring down SOPA – the Stop Online Piracy Act – which was criticised for providing too much power to government censors, while simultaneously overburdening internet providers. 115,000 companies altered their websites in protest against the bill, leading the Electronic Frontier Foundation to call the movement the biggest in internet history.
At the Freedom 2 Connect rally held following the defeat of SOPA, Swartz warned that it marked only one victory on the road of many trials. “The Internet really is out of control. But if we forget that, if we let Hollywood rewrite the story so it was just big company Google who stopped the bill, if we let them persuade us we didn’t actually make a difference, if we start seeing it as someone else’s responsibility to do this work and it’s our job just to go home and pop some popcorn and curl up on the couch to watch Transformers, well, then next time they might just win. Let’s not let that happen.”
The audience erupted in applause, but the speech came amidst the tumultuous events that lead to Swartz taking his own life.
In late 2010, Swartz received a guest pass to JSTOR, a trove of academic journals. JSTOR charged interested parties for access to these journals, with one exception: students and visitors to MIT’s open campus could use the network to view the documents for free.
Swartz found an unlocked wiring closet in Building 16, where he connected a laptop to MIT’s network and began to download the entire database over several weeks.
JSTOR noticed the unusual activity, and a game of cat-and-mouse ensued. Eventually, they located the source of the download, and placed a video camera in the closet to catch the responsible party.
The camera caught vision of Swartz switching hard drives on the laptop, ultimately leading to his arrest by MIT police and a US Secret Service agent on January 6, 2011.
He was indicted on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. JSTOR refused to file charges, but MIT – an institution celebrated for the way it valued freedom of information – seemed to remain involved in the federal court’s case.
The overzealous charges, which would have exposed Swartz to a maximum 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million fine, were believed by many to be handed down in response to recent data leak controversies surrounding Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning.
It was all too much for Swartz.
On returning to their Brooklyn apartment on January 11, 2013, Swartz’s partner found him dead, having hanged himself. He was 26.
Four days before his death, Lessig had received an e-mail from JSTOR, who had said they would be releasing all of their journal articles, free of charge, to anyone in the world. “And I didn’t have time to send it to Aaron; I was on — I was travelling. But I looked forward to seeing him again — I had just seen him the week before — and celebrating that this is what had happened. So, all of us think there are a thousand things we could have done, a thousand things we could have done, and we have to do, because Aaron Swartz is now an icon, an ideal. He is what we will be fighting for, all of us, for the rest of our lives.”
Response to Swartz’s death was fierce. Family and friends blamed a vicious prosecution, and MIT launched an investigation to understand how they could have handled the situation in order to avoid such a sorrowful end.
In August of 2013, Aaron Swartz was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. Though he died tragically young, his loss served to bolster the ranks of those who continue to fight for a fair and free internet. Of that, he would have surely been proud of.