Fwd: Aaron Swartz, Internet Activist, Dies at 26 - NYTimes

[Sam Halvorsen]

Hi all

Pretty concerning that downloading academic articles was the key issue here

Begin forwarded message:

From: Deb Ranjan Sinha <debs...@GMAIL.COM>
Date: 13 January 2013 14:28:34 GMT
To: <CRIT-GE...@JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
Subject: Aaron Swartz, Internet Activist, Dies at 26 - NYTimes
Reply-To: Deb Ranjan Sinha <debs...@GMAIL.COM>

At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that allows
users to subscribe to online information. He later became an Internet folk
hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in
July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to
JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary
journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the
entire library... On Wednesday, JSTOR announced that it would open its
archives for 1,200 journals to free reading by the public on a limited
basis.

<https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/technology/aaron-swartz-internet-activis
t-dies-at-26.html>

[Simon Thorpe]

'JSTOR declined to pursue the case. But Carmen M. Ortiz, a United States attorney, pressed on, saying that “stealing is stealing"'

Really disturbing. Property trumps all else as normal.

[Stefano Ba]

Right you are Simon.

It is also a very specific type of property, itellectual property (or something like that), which has been imposed by the US to the rest of the world, and it can be sometime very abstruse when it is applied to single cases: for the case of Aaron, his parents made another comparison: rather than steling books, he was just borrwoing them from a library...

 

So, it's a matter of interpretation, which - as usual - the power interprets in favour of the richer.

Let's remember that next time they tell us we live in a free society...

--
Stefano Ba'

Ci hanno insegnato la meraviglia verso la gente che ruba il pane
ora sappiamo che é un delitto il non rubare quando si ha fame.
(De André)

[Tom Henfrey]

Although actually using the Aaron Swartz memorial JSTOR liberator would involve a violation of JSTOR's terms of service, some of you may find it of intellectual interest:
http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/