ITP V.013: ONLY ONE PER COFFIN: R.I.P. AARON SWARTZ (DIGITAL PIONEER/ACTIVIST)

Digital pioneer, activist, REDDIT, CREATIVE COMMONS, RSS, DEMAND PROGRESS, ANTI-SOPA/PIPA and CISPA strikes and EFF co-founder AARON SWARTZ committed suicide yesterday in Brooklyn, New York,  SWARTZ was 26.







Swartz stood pending federal trial on computer fraud charges was scheduled to begin next month. In 2011, Swartz was arrested after prosecutors alleged he illegally downloaded millions of scientific journals from JSTOR, an online archive within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology network.

Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz: 

Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing. Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world. Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more. Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles. Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost. _____

Aaron is survived by his parents Robert and Susan Swartz, his younger brothers Noah and Ben, and his partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. 

Aaron’s funeral will be held on Tuesday, January 15 at Central Avenue Synagogue, 874 Central Avenue, Highland Park, Illinois 60035. Further details, including the specific time, will be posted athttp://rememberaaronsw.com, along with announcements about memorial services to be held in other cities in coming weeks. Remembrances of Aaron, as well as donations in his memory, can be submitted athttp://rememberaaronsw.com

Sat, 12th Jan                                                                                                                                                ITP V.013 EDITORS NOTE: I'm really saddened to hear of all of this. Aaron was a digital pioneer whom changed digital technology and revolutionized internet social networking as his work with creative commons and REDDIT was awesome, all of this before 30, now his life has expired. I'm sooo sorry to hear of Aaron's passing. http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully http://rememberaaronsw.tumblr.com/ http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html VIDEO BELOW: AARON SWARTZ: "HOW WE STOPPED SOPA":  FROM FROM EFF.ORG:

Yesterday Aaron Swartz, a close friend and collaborator of ours, committed suicide. This is a tragic end to a brief and extraordinary life.

Aaron did more than almost anyone to make the Internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way. His contributions were numerous, and some of them were indispensable. When we asked him in late 2010 for help in stopping COICA, the predecessor to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills, he founded an organization called Demand Progress, which mobilized over a million online activists and proved to be an invaluable ally in winning that campaign.

Other projects Aaron worked on included the RSSspecifications, web.py, tor2web, the Open Library, and the Chrome port of HTTPS Everywhere. Aaron helped launch the Creative Commons. He was a former co-founder at Reddit, and a member of the team that made the site successful. His blog was often a delight.

Aaron's eloquent brilliance was mixed with a complicated introversion. He communicated on his own schedule and needed a lot of space to himself, which frustrated some of his collaborators. He was fascinated by the social world around him, but often found it torturous to deal with.

For a long time, Aaron was more comfortable reading books than talking to humans (he once told me something like, "even talking to very smart people is hard, but if I just sit down and read their books, I get their most considered and insightful thoughts condensed in a beautiful and efficient form. I can learn from books faster than I can from talking to the authors."). His passion for the written word, for open knowledge, and his flair for self-promotion, sometimes produced spectacular results, even before the events that proved to be his undoing.

In 2011, Aaron used the MIT campus network to download millions of journal articles from theJSTOR database, allegedly changing his laptop's IP and MAC addresses when necessary to get around blocks put in place by JSTOR and MIT and sneaking into a closet to get a faster connection to the MIT network. For this purported crime, Aaron was facing criminal charges with penalties up to thirty-five years in prison, most seriously for "unauthorized access" to computers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

If we believe the prosecutor's allegations against him, Aaron had hoped to liberate the millions of scientific and scholarly articles he had downloaded from JSTOR, releasing them so that anyone could read them, or analyze them as a single giant dataset, something Aaron had done before. While his methods were provocative, the goal that Aaron died fighting for — freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it — is one that we should all support.

Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, and particularly their punishment regimes. Aaron's act was undoubtedly political activism, and taking such an act in the physical world would, at most, have a meant he faced light penalties akin to trespassing as part of a political protest. Because he used a computer, he instead faced long-term incarceration. This is a disparity that EFF has fought against for years. Yesterday, it had tragic consequences. Lawrence Lessig has called for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them. We agree.

Aaron, we will sorely miss your friendship, and your help in building a better world. May you read in peace.

FROM DEMAND PROGRESS:

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Demand Progress’s Aaron Swartz. Friends and family have issued a statement and created a memorial page, here.  A memorial fund is being organized, and we will post details when they are ready.

A handful of the myriad tributes to Aaron: Cory Doctorow Glenn Greenwald Lawrence Lessig Quinn Norton. 

FROM CREATIVE COMMONS:  As a teenager, Aaron Swartz helped design the Creative Commons licenses. His genius is reflected in RSS, Archive.org, DemandProgress.org, and dozens of other important projects. 

FROM JSTOR: JSTOR, which had stated it did not want to pursue charges against Swartz after he return the articles he had downloaded, posted a statement offering condolences to his family. He was a truly gifted person who made important contributions to the development of the internet and the web from which we all benefit,” JSTOR, or Journal Storage, said in a statement. “The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset.


FROM POSTERS ON THE NY TIMES COMMENTS SECTION:

(EB Madison, Wl):
His was not a crusade to make "everything digital...free" nor is that the opinion of many of the informed activists of his (and my) generation. JSTOR and the journals it collects live largely on scholarly articles, many from scholars at public universities or otherwise taxpayer funded research and studies. Like the materials on PACER, these have already been paid for by the general public, and now publishers make millions to charge individuals, universities, and libraries to access the information. He fought to keep people from having to pay for access to information they already owned - it was not entitlement, but a clear-cut sense of right that drove him. He'll be sorely missed. I wish he could have lived to mock them mercilessly, as they so plainly deserve. The real theft occured when the publisher took public research, written by taxpayer-funded professors, and charged the public money for it, without paying the authors. Absurdity, cut short by tragedy. Good work, Aaron. Rest in Peace. Again, a profound misunderstanding of the difference between intellectual property created for profit and royalties, and academic intellectual property most often paid for by the public.


(ADAM, NY):Again, a profound misunderstanding of the difference between intellectual property created for profit and royalties, and academic intellectual property most often paid for by the public The fact is that most of the *creators* of the intellectual property in JSTOR want to share their work with the public for free, but because of a profoundly broken system cannot. Academics and scientists do research that is mostly paid for by the public through grants. Those researchers are then forced to often *pay* publishers to publish their work, transfer the copyright to them (work they did not pay for or create), and they then sell if back to the universities for a profit other academics to read. The *creators* receive no compensation and actually PAY to have their work published.
1) Your tax dollars fund the research.
2) Your tax dollars are used to pay the publishing fees (often thousands of dollars) to for profit publishers.
3) Your tax dollars are then used to buy back the research you paid for to begin with for often exorbitant fees from those publishers. 4) The creators of the intellectual property (research) are not financially compensated in any way. Nor are the reviewers who do the vast majority of work in "publishing" the articles.Seems a bit broken doesn't it? That is what Aaron Swartz was fighting. A system where YOU pay for something three times, and the creator gets no financial benefit.

(RICH C. LAWRENCE, KANSAS): I don't know whether Aaron Swartz simply predated the Open Access movement spearheaded by academic institutions, researchers, and government agencies, most notably the NIH, or inspired it (in toto or partially). But his desire to get publicly-funded information freely available to the public clearly was its precursor. That he faced years or decades in prison for acting on that seems inherently unjust. I remember hearing about his action at MIT and thinking, "Well, he broke the law and did wrong." With the common-sense logic of open access to research that taxpayers pay for, I've changed my thinking to, "He might've broken the law, but he didn't do wrong." That puts him into some awfully good company.
"sorely missed.
Thanks-Stay Metal, Stay Brutal-\m/