Sharing knowledge is a great crime

[Tonington]

Aaron Swartz, the co-founder of Reddit, who contributed to the sharing of knowledge through the development of RSS web feeds, an activist who worked to expose SOPA, committed suicide on January 11, 2013. He was charged by the US Attorney's Office in Boston with 13 felony counts for illegally downloading and intending to distribute scholarly academic journal articles from JSTOR. His lawyer had requested a plea deal, but US Attorneys Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz rejected the deal, and demanded that Swartz plead guilty to all 13 counts and serve the jail time. He was facing up to 30 years in prison, and potentially a $1 million fine.

Some are remarking now on the sharp contrasts between the punishment Swartz was facing, and the lack of prosecutorial charges for actions that lead to the global financial recession in 2008. Academics are now posting links to their research in a tribute to Swartz on Twitter, using the hashtag #pdftribute. And now MIT is investigating their internal decisions for what part that may have played in this case.

Aaron is now being attributed to a "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" which was written in 2008:

Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable ... Those with access to these resources -- students, librarians, scientists -- you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not -- indeed, morally, you cannot -- keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world ... It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral -- it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy ... It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

Of course there is the sticky detail that universities and libraries pay huge sums of money for access to the journal databases. My view is that this will very much move in the same direction as other print media. It's an archaic model that no longer fits with what we have come to expect. Libraries are often forced to purchase subscriptions for entire libraries of say Wiley and Sons, or Elsevier, rather than for individual journals. My school as an agricultural college for instance doesn't need criminal justice articles, or particle physics journals. With electronic files now the print edition is becoming a nuisance. Documents like .pdf make it easier to store libraries of information, and to call them up with the click of a mouse. Already there are many open-source journals that provide the same peer review and quality control of the pay for access journals. Governments are beginning to demand as a condition of grant approvals that the scholarly studies funded by these grants must be open access. These are great changes which I hope one day will make the pay model obsolete.

It's a shame, truly. A keen mind and a populist activist.

 

[EagleSmack]

This is a big story around here.

 

[L Gilbert]

Yeah, the guy was doing some admirable work for the benefit of humankind as a whole. Knowledge should be available to whomever seeks it, not just to those who can afford it.
But martyring for it? Seems to be a bit extreme, IMO.

 

[darkbeaver]

Knowledge is power and that is never ever free. Parchment is more dependable than lots of the modern mediums.

 

[damngrumpy]

We must also look at who owned the material. For example some people are firemen, police
officers, store owners and so on. Others are involved in books, publications and magazines.
they have a right to be paid for their work the same as anyone going out in the employment
field of their choice.
There are companies that assemble such works educational and other wise they too should
be paid for the work they do. Writers, musicians and poets should also have control of their
work and be paid for their work.
Here is the dividing line however. Where libraries and Universities and other halls of knowledge
are concerned they should be able to purchase what is needed and not a huge bill for material
that is not. the same can be said for students, they should purchase what applies to them and
not have to buy reams of material that is expensive with no benefit.
This is where the issues of honesty and affordability collide.
I agree these works like others should and do have a monetary value and should be treated as
such. However people should be able to buy only what they need reducing customer cost.
It would balance out for the holders of copyright anyway because different people need different
pieces of information.

 

[WLDB]

30 years for this? Some people who have killed have gotten much less. I cant say I blame him though. If I was looking at 30 years in prison Id strongly consider doing what he did.

 

[Tonington]

'Open access' tributes to Aaron Swartz - SFGate

By late on Monday, more than 30,000 messages on the social media website Twitter contained the hashtag #pdftribute, notating them as tributes to Swartz's memory. Many of the tweets featured links to researchers' work in fields ranging from intellectual property law to medicine.​

Some good commentary from the academic perspective on open access at the link as well.
​

 

[EagleSmack]

30 years for this? Some people who have killed have gotten much less. I cant say I blame him though. If I was looking at 30 years in prison Id strongly consider doing what he did.

He didn't even go to trial.

 

[L Gilbert]

He didn't even go to trial.

Yeah. I'd at least have waited till the dust from the trial settled.