On the 11th January 2013, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his New York apartment having taken his own life. The 26 year old programmer was a founder of the well-known website Reddit and had been part of the development process for RSS, an application which many of us come across in our daily internet usage. In addition to his web-based achievements, Swartz was also an advocate of ethics and political activism, co-founding the Demand Progress internet group which lead the fight against web censorship through the SOPA campaign.
More recently, Swartz launched an attack upon the exclusivity of academic content, specifically targeting journal archive JSTOR, a resource that our university is subscribed to, thus allowing us to access its content without personal charge. Swartz, who is described as “always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good” had attempted to hack into, download and publicly distribute over 4 million articles from the archive, for which he was charged with over $1 million in fines and a potential 35 year prison sentence.
Just before his death, JSTOR announced that it would be making a large proportion of these articles free to access. I very much understand the need for academics to make a living through their work, but as investigator Alex Stamos stated in his testimony, Swartz’s extraction of material “from an unlocked closet” did not merit the sentence he was facing. There is now a “Read Online” function that essentially loans texts to members, allowing them three articles at a time without charge, but this change simply rendered Swartz’s attack futile and yet they continued his prosecution. It is hardly surprising that a man who had been a victim of depression for many years would have found this overwhelming and humiliating.
What can we as students take from this? As a humanities student, I find JSTOR invaluable, and I am certain that this feeling is fairly widespread through departments. Just take a moment to picture what your studies would be like if you were having to pay $25 US to look at an article that may have been useless to your work. We should certainly count ourselves lucky for being so privileged in this gift of information that others did not, and in some cases still do not possess.
In the last few weeks, we have seen a man who wished to extend this freedom of knowledge, persecuted into despair, his only crime described by Demand Process as a jail sentence for “checking too many books out of the library”. I would hesitate to call Swartz a martyr as the internet community has done, but I would certainly praise the activist for making such an impact. As much as I know I will return to JSTOR within weeks of writing this, my usage will now be tainted by the company’s poor timing in doing what was necessary to help expand the academic community, leading to the downfall of a great contemporary mind.
Liz Moore
exeposedev 