After the activist Aaron Swartz (photo ©Fred Benenson) took his own life on January 11, 2013 an international mobilization started to remember but also for someone to have some justice because they believe he’s been treated unfairly.
Born on November 8, 1986 in Chicago, Illinois, Aaron Swartz became interested in computers since he was a child, also thanks to the fact that his father owned a software company. He was only 14 years old when he helped create the RSS 1.0 specification, one of the most popular format for distributing web contents.
Aaron Swartz attended for about a year Stanford University but left it to create Infogami, a software company. In November 2005, the company merged with Reddit, purchased the following year by Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired.
For some time, Aaron Swartz kept on working on the project Reddit in San Francisco but his dissatisfaction grew and in early 2007 he was asked to resign. Swartz started suffering from depression but launched Jottit and created the web application framework web.py. He was also co-founder of Demand Progress, an organization specializing in petitions against Internet censorship and other similar issues.
Aaron Swartz had his first legal problems in 2009, when he allegedely downloaded and released documents from the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database but after an investigation also from FBI no charges were filed against him.
In 2011, Aaron Swartz was formally charged by Carmen Ortiz, U.S. Attorney for Masschussets, with various offenses for downloading more than four million academic papers from the JSTOR database using the MIT network. In total he risked a sentence that could exceed 30 years in prison.
Aaron Swartz returned the hard drives with the downloaded documents to the JSTOR managers, who decided to abandon any litigation with him. Instead, U.S. Attorney Ortiz decided to continue the prosecution. Already depressed, last Friday Swartz took his own life.
The death of Aaron Swartz immediately started a huge controversy, initiatives to remember him from famous people such as the world-wide-web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, a petition to remove Carmen Ortiz from her office as U.S. Attorney and also revenge by Anonymous. MIT has announced an internal investigation to clarify the role of the university in the case that led to Swartz’s death. The initiative pdftribute invited researchers to release their research in open access format.
Aaron Swartz was a brilliant young man who in his short life has offered so much to the Internet and in return was treated like a criminal. Is it acceptable that in a civilized country releasing academic papers can lead to risk a sentence that could be harsher than that given to some murderers? Is it possible that an Attorney pursues an offense of this kind with such harshness when the alleged victims have clearly expressed their willingness to drop the matter?
We really need to think if we want a closed world that crushes people like Aaron Swartz or a world in which knowledge is shared as it was the will of this activist who was a hacker in the trueest sense of the word.
