Honest question, I don’t mean the slightest bit of snark or dismissal.
As a parent and an individual who has my share of battle scars, I feel deeply for anyone, particularly someone young, who can’t see through their problems and opts for the big exit door.
But the simple fact is that Swartz poked a tiger right in the ass and (quite predictably) got mauled as a result. I can’t find his actions, or those who support them, or Anonymous’s currently occurring techno-protest, all that admirable… but then, I never found the crowd that ranted about RIAA because they didn’t want to pay for music very appealing, either. My attitude aside, “he who would ride the tiger must first learn to dismount” - if you’re going to piss off a planet-scale enemy, you have to be prepared for the consequences.
Other than that big gummint came down on this kid the way they would have if he’d committed any other major crime, why is it a case worth special attention and feelings?
Well, no, that’s not what happened. First, JSTOR was handed a hard drive with all the downloaded material on it, and considered it done, and stopped recommending even charges, let alone jail time. The state prosecutor recognized that it was a publicity stunt, and was going to let Swartz walk with a stern warning.
Then the feds got involved, and decided to make an example of Swartz. With MIT’s co-operation, they charged him with thirteen felonies, potentially carrying a max of 30+ years in jail, for what were essentially violations of the terms of use for MIT’s network. Then, in typical fed fashion, they said “we’ll give you six months jail time and a bunch of felony convictions, or you can risk more than three decades in jail.”
It was the felony conviction that prevented Swartz from taking the deal, and rightly so–there was zero economic damage to JSTOR, it wasn’t theft in any sense of the word, and the feds were basically enforcing a TOU document for MIT that MIT wasn’t particularly strict about. The club the Feds wielded was potentially decades in jail, after a long trial costing millions to defend, so guaranteeing financial ruin in any case.
So why should you feel sorry for him? Because he suffered from depression, and got stuck in a manifestly unjust meat grinder. As with the Duke Lacrosse case, the most salient question is really “how often does this happen where the defendant isn’t a photogenic white guy with the cash to properly stand up for this rights?” And the answer, as we’re finding out subsequently, is “almost always”. 95% of cases with the U.S. Attorney end up in plea deals. And thanks to the publicity, we’re finding out that Ortiz was a fan of abusing civil forfeiture laws as well to bankrupt defendants beforehand.
It was a Kafka-esque situation for a smart young activist with a particular vulnerability.
First, how is my version “not what happened”? Swartz deliberately set up a system to pull down a megabuttload of JSTOR documents - illegally. He knew it was illegal. He knew there could and probably would be consequences. There were, and they turned out to be more than he could handle.
Sincerely, all due sympathy and regret to him, his family and anyone affected by his suicide… but maybe that suicide was executed by jacking the laptop in where it wasn’t supposed to be and everything else was a certain degree of inevitable.
If he’d pulled a gun in a downtown bank and been handed a big bag of cash, then tossed it back and said, “just kidding!” I doubt the feds would have let it slide, even if the bank no longer cared to make an issue of it.
Maybe it was just a stupid prank and the soda machine fell over and crushed him. Not the intended outcome… but what Anonymous is doing seems to be excessive and at right angles to the reality of the base mistake.
Leave the suicide out of it. Say that that’s unforeseeable even though things like this do happen from time to time. You still have a guy who was threatened with enormous and possibly life-wrecking penalties for what amounts to something like a copyright dispute. To me that doesn’t seem like a reasonable or intelligent prosecution. That’s not in the best interest of justice, especially when the people he supposedly wronged felt it was such a minor issue.
I have to disagree on almost every point. The suicide is an integral part of the situation because it’s so extreme and so final, and precludes there ever being a reasonable outcome - for any definition of reasonable. If it had simply dragged on for years and years it would be a minor issue.
The suicide aside, this case troubles me in the same way all piracy cases do: that one faction regards copyright and intellectual property rights as something between trivial and (!) an assault on their rights. I don’t think Swartz’ violation was trivial, even if the net result was no loss of protected information to third (fourth?) parties.
With few exceptions, those who think information should be free have never had a datum worth a dime to anyone else. (And/or are clueless grad students, and/or turn into info-bitches when they make their breakthrough discovery.)
I think it can be argued that the government response was out of scale when the target was one 22-year-old essentially pulling a prank. But the key phrase is that they “decided to make an example out of him” - oh, yes they did. Because he waved his dick in their faces and dared them to, and for entirely worthwhile reasons the government does not regard intellectual property rights as optional.
My point is that even if Swartz’s defenders weren’t blaming the government for his suicide, the fact remains that he was being threatened with enormous penalties for a minor infraction.
Fewer people would be aware of it for sure and the regret would be less, but I think people who are concerned with these issues would still be up in arms about this case.
Yes, that’s one of the major disputes going on today, and I agree that some people have a very entitled attitude toward work being done by others. But I wonder if you’re letting your antipathy toward those people color your opinion on Swartz.
Then it’s hard to see how it was anything but trivial. My understanding is that he downloaded a lot of data that was available to him for free. It’s possible he was going to share this with other people (who might or might not have had to pay for it if they wanted it).
Swartz would appear to be one of those exceptions.
How? (And this pretty well answers my question about antipathy.)
People who violate copyrights generally don’t face decades of jail time.
I’m really not trying to be contentious or push this in a particular direction - I have my understanding of the situation and I’m holding it up to see where I might be wrong.
My understanding is that it was a deliberate stunt to suck as much JSTOR material on to a private record as he could, with no real point or purpose except to do it and tweak JSTOR and the university about information control. If that’s the case, more or less, then yes, I am antipathetic towards Swartz for this and towards anyone who supports his acts.
Which neither stops it from being a tragedy nor makes Swartz a martyr. IMVHO.
Prosecutors don’t understand the concept of justice. It requires a career-minded sociopathy to get into the job. The prospect of “winning” is what matters, and winning big by getting a bigger sentence or a bigger fine is even better. Nothing else enters into it. Until we get this mentality out of our “justice system” this is going to keep happening.
To use the OP’s analogy, I understand that people get killed when they play with tigers. But the response to that happening is not to just accept it as something that’s going to happen. When a tiger eats one person, the village gets together and puts the tiger in a cage so it won’t keep eating people. And if the tiger won’t go into the cage, they shoot it.
That’s the lesson we need to take away here. Publishers need to be brought under control and the penalties for copyright violations need to be brought back to proportionate levels.
And if the publishers won’t accept this, well, then we do something else.
This wasn’t even a tiger. This was some guy plaing with a large cow - strong, but not particularly violent. It gave him a bit of a nudge or overstepping boundaries which were vague to begin with.
Frankly, I’m of the opinion that Ortiz should be executed. But then, I believe that prosecutors should be held to the highest moral sandards that their punishments exceptionally harsh, and she’s not the first. But she absolutely overstepped her bounds, grossly abused her power, and violated the dispassionate principle of justice. She specifically targeted Schwartz and was intent and actively using her office to as a weapon to inflict specific harm upon him, personally.
Wrong. He knew that he was free to download them individually via MIT’s network, to which he was granted free access. He knew he could download a large number of them without repercussion. None of this was illegal. All of this was explicitly allowed.
At some point JSTOR and MIT network admins started putting trivially avoided roadblocks in his path, at which point it became a game of cat and mouse, at which point Swartz was exploiting what was basically a gentlemen’s code of conduct. Still nothing illegal, except according to the weird and arbitrary definitions of computer crime under which he was charged–and which were not evidently applicable to what he was doing.
At that point the state prosecutor tried to step in and say “alright, everyone’s had their fun, now go home.” That would have been the end of it, except MIT inexplicably decided to make an issue out of it. I say “inexplicable” because MIT has a long history of tolerating and even celebrating hacks and stunts of this sort. JSTOR was satisfied when Swartz handed over the media on which he’d downloaded it. Someone at MIT, though, decided that more needed to be done. The feds were brought in, and spun felonies out of the existing computer crime statutes with their bizarre interpretations of damages.
Swartz didn’t know it was illegal, and what he did in large volume was something he was freely and explicitly permitted to do in small volumes. His actions were to highlight this discrepancy.
I think hansel has said everything I might want to, and probably better than I could. I’ll just point out that there’s this petition to the White House to remove Carmen Ortiz, the US Attorney for Massachusetts, from office for her handling of this case.
Also, ever since his death, I’ve ended up reading a lot more about Aaron Swartz, and he seems like an amazing person in many ways. For example, I’ve seen the book Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein, mentioned here several times, and finally got arounf to reading it this past fall. A few years before the book was written, Aaaron happened across Rick Perlstein’s work, and decided he could use a webpage. So he contacted him out of the blue to offer to make him one. Later, Aaron was the first person outside the Perlstein household to read Nixonland as Rick finished each chapter. Even in a counterfactual universe where his actions warranted the response of the federal prosecutors, the world is worse off for his loss.
I don’t know how it is in the US, but in Commonwealth countries, the prosecutors are under a duty to only prosecute when the public interest demands it.
I feel sorry for him in that he got in over his head. I’ve been in that position, but I saw other paths out of my problem. Not everyone can. Feel sorry for him for that. We’re not all strong enough to deal with the consequences of our actions.
I don’t feel sorry for him in that he got involved in civil disobedeince and got caught. He knew he could get in trouble for what he was doing. At least I know one could, and I haven’t attended MIT. An intergral part of civil disobedience is that when you get caught, you do the time, and make it part of your protest. It’s fucking hard.
The feds didn’t care about the JSTOR stuff – not even JSTOR/MIT did. They brought the hammer down in the form of trumped up charges because he was associated with WikiLeaks.
For the record, I don’t believe you. It’s not snark, but dismissal … definitely.
Major crime? Not buying it, nor does anyone else.
You really countenance a 30-year sentence for a copyright violation so minor that the offended party didn’t even prosecute? Sad, that people can lose all human empathy like that.