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Aaron Swartz
committed suicide after facing federal charges for releasing information to the
public that he felt should be freely available. As a teenager, Swartz helped
create RSS, which allowed users to subscribe to online information. At the
young age of 26, he had already formed a company that merged with Reddit, the popular
news and information site, co-founded Demand Progress, a group that promotes
online campaigns in social issues, and in 2008 took on PACER. Swartz faced trouble
when he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records. The
database was charging money for documents, but Swartz felt that these documents
should be free because they were being produced at the public’s expense. He
ended up downloading 20 million documents from PACER and releasing them to the
public. The government quickly shut the free library down.
At this point,
Swartz feared that the feds would come “crashing down the [his] door, taking
everything away.” In 2011 he faced more serious charges when he downloaded 4.8 million
documents from JSTOR. Although JSTOR is nonprofit, institutions pay thousands
of dollars for the publication. Swartz changed the flow of information in the
Internet world and his main goal was to make many Web files free and open to
the public. He faced 35 years in prison and 1 million in fines.
Aaron Swartz was
a computer genius and truly believed that documents should be free for the
public. We looked at this article in my Topics in Communications Theory class
and we all agreed that it seemed like the government was in fear of something
larger. Swartz was just wanting the public to have access to documents that he
felt should be free, but obviously the government feared his capability as a
computer whiz. Was it the fight over ownership or something more? The motives are
unclear but Swartz fight for public access to documents will be greatly
admired.
This is truly sad. Someone like Aaron Swartz could have really changed the internet and computer world as we know it, but instead the government shut him out because they were losing money off of his activism. I don’t understand what the government is so afraid of when someone stands up against them for what they believe in. One little thing and they think that all Hell will break loose and they’ll lose their hold over us. The government used to be for the people and by the people. If Swartz thought that it was the people’s right to have a free library of certain documents, then it should’ve been taken under consideration. Granted, he probably shouldn’t have stolen millions of dollars’ worth of documents. Even with that being said, the government should not have scared him into committing suicide over this. It wasn’t like he was charging for this information, but making it free to the public. The fact that the fight about this was probably just over money is ridiculous and terrible.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think the fight is just beginning. It's very unfortunate what happened to Swartz but I think in some weird way that the publicity from this will probably have a positive effect on his goal of public records. We are in the midst of a similar battle regarding free vs. paid text books at the university level.
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