Aaron Swartz: A life remembered, a legacy debated

Last Monday’s post about the tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz inspired a huge response from the residents of Cringeville, both in the comments and on email. I wanted to share some of the latter here.

First, though, an aside: Yesterday the Westboro Baptist Church announced it had canceled its plans to stage a protest at Swartz’s funeral, which meant that Anonymous did not have to follow through with its plan to form a human shield around the mourners to protect them from those a******s. Thank goodness for small favors. The event was tragic enough without turning the funeral into a circus.

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But the news of this story got me to thinking once again about how much the WBC ironically resembles 4chan, from which the Anonymous movement seems to have sprung. Both groups seem utterly determined to be as offensive to as many human beings as humanly possible. The biggest difference to me is that 4chan’s offensiveness has been almost entirely virtual (and often laced with humor), while the church chooses to do its trolling in three dimensions (usually laced with hate). The WBC’s “protests” have been so over the top, that for a long time I have suspected the founders of being a version of the Merry Pranksters, conducting an experiment to measure just how depraved people can be if they set their minds to it.

I digress. In my post I focused on how our government has demonized crimes involving technology, many of them better described as acts of protest than theft. I can see a clear line linking back from prosecuting Swartz’s “crime” (downloading more documents than he was legally allowed to from a trove of academic papers, with the intent of distributing them free online) to the actions of the RIAA and MPAA in suing file sharers for tens of thousands of dollars. It’s the content cartel acting like a bully yet again, with the help of our government.

That post made some readers believe I condone piracy of intellectual property. That’s not the case. Swapping files to avoid paying for stuff is cheap and low rent. What I object to are the tactics of the content cartel, the overinflated claims of damage, and the oversized penalties allowed under the law. If the recording industry is dying, I believe the wounds have been largely self-inflicted; file swapping is a largely a response to a pattern of disregard by the music industry over the years.

Swartz’s motive for downloading the files from JSTOR and distributing them via BitTorrent, however, seems more benign: the notion that academic research should be part of the public commons, not locked behind a paywall. Even then, some readers vehemently disagreed. For example, reader T. B. writes:

There’s a problem with the assumption that hacktivists have everyone’s best interest at heart. There is NO WAY to have a society where EVERYONE gets to decide what is best and then act on it. That’s called ANARCHY and if we had anarchy, I think you’d be complaining about that even more. I personally agree that information should be free, but your right to swing your fist doesn’t stop three inches past my nose. Hacktivists will get a lot more respect from me when they start realizing that other people have rights too, and my rights are not subordinate to the hacktivist’s activism.

I don’t assume hacktivists have everyone’s best interests at heart, but I don’t believe they should be punished more severely than people who’ve committed far more serious crimes of a commercial nature. The example I used in my last post was a major international bank guilty of money laundering that walked away with a large fine; there are many others.

W. B. writes:

I agree with most of your arguments…. Government behavior was outlandish. However, suicide was a gross over-reaction. He was facing jail time; he had not been convicted. And the fact that JSTOR made its articles freely available suggests that he could have beaten the charges. Aaron Swartz could have fought back to defend the principles he believed in – instead he took the coward’s way out.

As I understand it, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz was insisting that Swartz spend at least six months behind bars as part of a plea bargain. Given what we know about the fragile state of the 26-year-old’s psyche, it doesn’t surprise me he chose suicide instead. You could argue whether six months was still too excessive in the JSTOR case, but it’s a moot point now.

Reader D. B. was among those who concurred with me that jail time for this kind of crime is a bit harsh:

Unfortunately, you are too close to the truth. It costs the tax payer around $45,000 a year to put someone in jail. And our government seems to do it for all the wrong reasons.

On the other hand, Cringester M. D. took exception to my including the Bradley Manning case as an example of an overzealous government treating cyber offenders more harshly than others. He wrote:

The Bradley Manning comparison?!?!?! With all due respect, way off base, man. Waaaaayy, off base. Treason is sort of a big deal. Any attempt at slipping “gray area” into the Manning situation is just an exercise in rationalization. The damage that kid and his albino buddy did may never be known. If Manning had done this back in the days when you were just a child, Manning would have already been executed. … Don’t try to make Manning a poster child for any cause. He’s not worthy of it. Stick to Swartz.

I have to say he’s right. The Manning comparison was off base. Mea culpa.

A more apt comparison would have been Kim Dotcom, who was the victim of a drug cartel kingpin-style takedown by New Zealand commandos working under the direction of the FBI, all for alleged crimes against copyrights. Even if Dotcom is guilty of making millions from facilitating illegal downloads of movies, the actions against him were ludicrously over the top — and New Zealand’s top court agreed.

How does the Aaron Swartz tragedy make you feel? Share it with us below or email me directly: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Aaron Swartz: A life remembered, a legacy debated,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.