11 ms·

Civil Disobedience

167 points by amouat 14y ago

davemel37 14y ago
I thought Swartz's issue was PUBLICLY funded research behind pay walls, not all research... David Byrne missed the boat on this one.
- unreal37 14y ago
  Not all of it is publicly funded. Perhaps very little of it.
cowsandmilk 14y ago
It seems to be that David Byrne isn't that familiar with Aaron Swartz's fight. He says: Withholding cancer research from academics who can’t afford access because a big pharmaceutical company “owns” the data doesn’t seem like a very morally defensible position—even if it is what the law might say is perfectly legal. I do not know what he is referring to here at all. (1) JSTOR likely does not have much cancer research in the journals it covers. (2) Publications are owned by publishers, not any "big pharmaceutical company". The "big pharmaceutical company" receives no payment from the purchase of articles, and in some cases has to pay to publish in the journal that then also requires assignment of the copyright and charges for access the content.
- andrewcooke 14y ago
  is that an important detail? his main point, it seems to me, is that when compared with other rights protesters, swartz fought going to jail. i don't know if that's true (and would black rights protesters have defended themselves legally if they had the means?), but it's an interesting point about tactics. more generally, even though it wasn't the most informed article, i thought it was interesting - a smart person trying to understand a complex situation, not afraid to point out problems, and not afraid to acknowledge the lack of clear answers.
  - sp332 14y ago
    As far as I know, black rights protesters weren't charged with 13 felonies.
    - DanBC 14y ago
      They were, however, lynched, shot, beaten (sometimes to death) and illegally jailed.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
    - gyardley 14y ago
      They certainly weren't: http://www.splcenter.org/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-martyrs http://www.splcenter.org/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-...
    - objclxt 14y ago
      Firstly, civil rights protesters were charged with numerous crimes - not just related to the Jim Crow laws, but as part of an active campaign to silence them (Martin Luther King, for example, was charged with tax fraud by Alabama, which he was found innocent of). Secondly, I don't see the relevance of the number of felonies being charged at any one time. Many in the civil rights movement were repeatedly arrested, charged, and tried over many, many years. And many faced length sentences off only one or two charges. I'm not totally sure of the point you were trying to make, but if you're trying to equate Aaron Swartz's persecution with that of those in the civil rights movement then you're treading onto extremely shaky ground.
      - sp332 14y ago
        Here's the part of the comment I was replying to: compared with other rights protesters, swartz fought going to jail. Those protesters certainly "fought" whatever it was they were put through!
- amouat 14y ago
  I agree. I hesitated on submitting the article as several statements seem a bit uninformed. But it is an interesting article from a notable person.
  - betterunix 14y ago
    What makes the article interesting is not the point that it makes, but the perspective that a musician would have on these issues. There seems to be this idea that academic publishing companies are like recording companies, and that researchers have the same relationship with publishers as musicians have with recording studios. His view of this issue is very much shaped by his profession.
RyanMcGreal 14y ago
> it seems he illegally hacked his way into an MIT database Rather, he improperly downloaded a large number of academic papers from JSTOR via MIT's network - papers that were publicly funded and were legally accessible to people on MIT's network, but which Aaron believed should be widely accessible to everyone. The prosecutor tried to bully Aaron into pleading guilty to an array of felony charges for the supposed crime of violating a TOS contract.
- kyboren 14y ago
  This. A thousand times: this. I really feel like this really cuts to the core of the problem with "cybercrime". The fact is, most people have absolutely no understanding of the technical details of the "crimes" most hackers carry out. Most distressingly, this seems to include public prosecutors and judges. I am not sure if this is a result of misapplied analogies, or "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", or something else, or some combination of the above. In any case, our biggest priority should not just be reforming the law to match a more careful and technically nuanced version of computer crime. Indeed, our greatest goal should be to expand public awareness and appreciation of what hackers are, what they do, and how they go about doing it. I intentionally use the ambiguous term, "hacker" here. Until people understand what is really going on, they will forever remain ignorant of the proper course of justice.
  - RyanMcGreal 14y ago
    We can add the constant abuse of the terms "steal" and "theft", which make no sense when applied to the act of making a copy of a digital file.
    - cobrausn 14y ago
      To play devil's advocate here... Let's say I work a full day with the understanding that I will get paid for my efforts. The employer then refuses to pay me. It would not be uncommon for someone to say that the employer 'stole' from you, or call them a 'thief'. I could also see how many people would equate that to downloading a copy of something that required effort to produce and was being offered under specific terms. I could see how arguing about the verbage, to most people, is just an exercise in pedantry and (as far as they are concerned) misses the point.
thoughtcriminal 14y ago
He was, as I have read, a disturbed young man who maybe sadly wasn’t quite psychologically ready to be a Gandhi figure—should he have realized this ahead of time? This, to me, gets to the heart of the matter. Aaron meant well, but he lacked strategy and was unprepared for the psychological tactics of the DOJ. Especially since I've read from numerous sources he suffered depression. As the law was bearing down on him, he was fighting a battle within him. He had no refuge.
- RyanMcGreal 14y ago
  An essay by Aaron's girlfriend, Taren Strinebrickner-Kauffman: http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/42260548767/why-aaron-died http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/42260548767/why-aaron-died
  - Kylekramer 14y ago
    While I respect her opinion and understand that she knew Aaron very well, I don't really see why we should trust her opinion on whether he was depressed. Way too close to the issue.
    - sp332 14y ago
      Depression is not (yet) characterized by any physical cause. The only definition of clinical depression is a set of behavioral symptoms. If he didn't have those symptoms (even in retrospect), then he wasn't depressed. "The diagnosis of major depressive disorder is based on the patient's self-reported experiences, behavior reported by relatives or friends, and a mental status examination." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_depression
      - Kylekramer 14y ago
        Sure, but you will never find a clinician who would base their depression diagnosis based only on behavior reported by a significant other. Especially immediately following a suicide.
ghiculescu 14y ago
This post reminded me of the Talking Heads song Listening Wind, which also seems to be about a "matyr". No doubt Byrne's opinions have changed a bit in the 30 years since be wrote it, though. http://xms.songmeanings.net/m/song/3530822107858498600/ http://xms.songmeanings.net/m/song/3530822107858498600/
- geoka9 14y ago
  Well, he also wrote such songs as Psycho Killer. Songs do not necessarily reflect their author's point of view. And there's also "Stop Making Sense" :)
betterunix 14y ago
Oh Mr. Byrne, you come from a different world. Having "doubts" that the authors of academic articles see "much of" a share of the money publishers or databases bring in suggests that there is some hope that we would see any of it. The reality is that almost nobody is paid for their articles, and almost nobody even expects to be. Often, the reviewers of articles -- the people who make journals worth reading at all -- are unpaid for that work. Even editors are often volunteers. I guess we cannot be surprised that a musician would have such a view of copyright. Of course, the article seems to go off the deep end at some points: "Imagine, as MIT seems to have briefly done, that it was the Chinese or North Koreans or some other entity stealing this data" Yes, imagine the horror if the Chinese or North Koreans were reading published scientific research. I am sure that the authors of these articles are terrified by the idea that people in China might learn from their work, thus explaining why they published in journals with a global reach.
- frossie 14y ago
  Just to be clear, not only do authors not get paid for journal articles, but it is not unusual that they have to pay to submit their articles (so-called "page charges"). Given that sometimes these researchers belong to organizations funded by the taxpayer, what you have is a situation where you, the taxpayer, are paying companies like Elsevier to profit from blocking access to publicly funded research.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    No, you're paying Elsevier to digitize, index, catalogue, and host publicly funded research. None of that is free. People are free to pony up the money to create an alternate system, and researchers are free to use it. Nothing is stopping them from doing so. People continue to pay Elsevier, JSTOR, etc, because they value the convenience of using a system that's already established and widely used.
    - betterunix 14y ago
      "you're paying Elsevier to digitize, index, catalogue, and host publicly funded research" Really, is that what we are paying them for? Well that's interesting, because the next paper I submit, which I am preparing now, is written in LaTeX and is submitted electronically. In the LaTeX source, I have to write keywords and codes that classify the article. The article is hosted on my website, which is hosted on the university's computer. So remind me, what is the publisher being paid for?
danso 14y ago
> But back to civil disobedience. Swartz stole the material, pure and simple, and he seems to feel that he and others have, in this case, the right to steal because they are beholden to a higher moral standard. I am sort of fine with this if he’s willing to accept the consequences, as Ellsberg and the Civil Rights activists were. This argument has been used to discredit Aaron as an activist, and at worst, to paint him as a spoiled sissy. But I'm not so sure that Aaron should be judged as a civil rights activist because I don't think he intended to promote his cause with civil disobedience. Instead, I think Aaron seemed to care more about the successful dissemination of the information, with attention to his cause being the secondary objective. Or else why would he engage in such subterfuge to download from JSTOR, when he very well could've just walked into the MIT Library, shouted "FOR FREEDOM!" as he flipped on an AlienWare laptop and the scraper script? He masked his face, hid his laptop in the closet, because he wanted to actually get the data and disseminate it...the information itself was the greater good, it seems. Unlike MLK Jr., who wanted to get arrested to bring attention to the plight of minorities, getting arrested would prevent Aaron from actually distributing the academic information. Ironically, if Aaron had acted like a MLK Jr. of Information Rights, people would be ripping on him as a showboat. One of the interesting anecdotes that came from his memorial was from someone who had asked Aaron to deliver the keynote at F2C2012. The person had expected Aaron to talk about the JSTOR incident in order to raise awareness for his cause, but instead, as you probably know, Aaron chose to talk about how the people stopped SOPA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg When Aaron pitched his fundraising drive on HN, IIRC, he didn't put much of an effort, even after he received a huge amount of criticism. Maybe Aaron was just awful at PR in general, but I don't think someone of his skill in civic activism would've come so unprepared to beat the drum if beating the drum was his real objective. So yes, Aaron deserves some criticism for thinking he could get away with it and for not planning for the worst-case scenario. But to say that he's a wimpy hypocrite for not accepting the jail time for his moral stand seems to miss the point...taking the moral stand seemed secondary to him in comparison to the greater good of spreading information. And to imply that he was cowardly misses the fact that not too long ago, Aaron was subjected to FBI surveillance for doing something that was undoubtedly legal when he "freed" the PACER archives. That he so quickly jumped back into the fray after that -- nevermind the work he did in raising awareness against SOPA -- strikes me as being pretty brave, if reckless, as far as tech-revolutionists go.
per 14y ago
Mr. Byrne adds a different perspective to this story, connecting it with historic fights for liberty. I welcome his openness, perspective and humble attitude. Since he doesn't have an emotional or industrial connection to Aaron Swartz he can enable a wider discussion around the issue of liberating information, copyright and open source.
icambron 14y ago
This article makes little sense to me. Really, civil rights activists shouldn't have fought going to jail over having sat at the front of the bus? Letting the government run them over was the right thing to do? No, the answer is to fight in any venue you can, and the court is a perfectly reasonable one to do it in; that's a major way that laws and their interpretations get changed. In fact, an activist defending herself in court is exactly how buses eventually got desegregated.[1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browder_v._Gayle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browder_v._Gayle Questions of strategy aside, Byrne is a little too quick to buy the government's story that a crime was actually committed, and much too loose with the words "theft" and "hacking", and of course the stuff about "our security" is nonsense. Swartz could not, should not have expected to go to jail for what he did. That the civil rights protesters expected and received jail time for straightforward violations of law may make them more powerful heros in Byrne's eyes, and that's fair enough (leaving the importance of their respective causes aside -- I'm not the one making this comparison). No one is claiming Swartz is today's Rosa Parks. But it doesn't make Swartz's actions less just and his persecution less unjust.
- peejaybee 14y ago
  Damn right. I've always rejected the notion that civil disobedience precludes defending yourself in court, especially when the authorities come at you with felony charges. It's a little too convenient for the authorities, in my opinion.
- unreal37 14y ago
  No I think his point was that Swartz was trying to "get away with it" in his actions during the MIT incident (hiding his face from the cameras, etc), and wasn't prepared to be caught. Clearly, he wasn't willing to plead guilty or do any jail time. In most of the other examples (Pentagon Papers, Bus desegregation), the people were prepared to be caught and wanted to highlight the immorality of the law. They weren't sneaking onto the bus.
  - popee 14y ago
    Get away with what? Isn't MIT network open and isn't JSTOR allowing everyone from that network to download articles? I'm really not informed about this, so please inform me. On the other side it looks like witch hunt from the start.
largesse 14y ago
He seems to have his facts wrong. Swartz did have legal access to the articles. He merely used an alternative mechanism for acquiring them quickly.
- unreal37 14y ago
  So breaking into a cabinet in the basement of MIT was legal? And when he hid his face with his bike helmet, he did that even though he knew he wasn't doing anything illegal? I think even Aaron Swartz knew he was breaking some law at the time he was doing it, but at the same time the prosecutor was going after him for 35-55 years worth of jail time was clearly excessive meant to get him to plead guilty and not go to trial...
squozzer 14y ago
I don't disagree with Byrne's position on Swartz's actions. But Byrne's implicit comparison of the feds to Inspector Javert -- he might have done better to pay more attention to that facet of the case. Imagine whom the feds might have cut loose to make room for Mr. Swartz -- probably a killer or rapist. Based on incidents like these and others -- such as Tommy Chong's stretch in the poke for selling paraphenalia -- it's not hard to justify the hypothesis that the state jails hackers and paroles murderers to keep the rest of us in a state of perpetual, dependent fear.
akikuchi 14y ago
It is interesting to see the different reactions to this article. Byrne is clearly sympathetic to Aaron’s cause, and to the fact that civil disobedience and other sometimes subversive methods can be effective in dealing with injustice. There seem to be many comments attacking him for various minor gripes, choice of language, his incomplete understanding of the situation, etc. But that seems to miss the point. He’s ultimately asking how did this end up so wrong, and what can we learn from this tragic situation. How far should someone need to be prepared to go when taking a stand? How might more effective publicity/messaging have furthered the cause or helped prevent the judicial process from spiraling out of hand. Technical advancement and the proliferation of data create scenarios that are clearly not intuitive to the average person. There seems to be a tendency to sometimes attack/lecture less technically proficient observers, rather than try to more meaningfully communicate and get to the heart of the issue. Byrne connects the JSTOR situation to the very different realms of wikileaks, manning, music publishing, etc. For those who care about the rules governing information sharing, IP, etc, this begs the critical question of “how do we differentiate among these ideas, so they are not all muddled together in the public’s eye.”
- bo1024 14y ago
  He definitely makes many great connections to the larger picture. The problem is that he gets many of the ideological details wrong, which is really unfortunate as it leads to potential misjudgments of Swaartz's cause. Specifically, 1. Swaartz did have legal access to all of these files. There was no "theft" involved (Byrne's statement, "Swartz stole the material, pure and simple", is a hefty misunderstanding). He was, however, exploiting a loophole. He also violated the website's terms of service and trespassed at MIT. 2. Byrne seems to be implying that Swaartz should have admitted he was wrong and accepted jail time or being a martyr. But at no time was Swaartz ever offerred a punishment within three orders of magnitude of any that fit the crime. Should Rosa Parks have plead guilty to carjacking? 3. Byrne seems to think that all of the articles in repositories like JSTOR are "proprietary". In fact, a huge number are not. They have expired copyrights and are public domain; this was a large part of Swaartz's cause. To JSTOR's great credit, they have been expanding access to these articles since Swaartz's arrest, so in that respect his civil disobedience got the message across. 4. Byrne treats academic research somewhat as a monetizable commodity, like music. But not only do academics not see a penny on publications, but more importantly, members of subscribing institutions already have free and unlimited access to read any of these articles. It is just individuals not connected to big universities who have to pay large amounts (and this hurts the authors, who want people to read their work). The justification for charging for access to papers is not to monetize them, but that it costs upkeep to host and organize them. But of course, a P2P distribution of torrents would go a long way toward solving this problem for free, making both the authors and readers happier (but not the middleman).
akikuchi 14y ago
It is interesting to see the different reactions to this article. Byrne is clearly sympathetic to Aaron’s cause, and to the fact that civil disobedience and other sometimes subversive methods can be effective in dealing with injustice. There seem to be many comments attacking him for various minor gripes, choice of language, his incomplete understanding of the situation, etc. But that seems to miss the point. He’s ultimately asking how did this end up so wrong, and what can we learn from this tragic situation. How far should someone need to be prepared to go when taking a stand? How might more effective publicity/messaging have furthered the cause or helped prevent the judicial process from spiraling out of hand. Technical advancement and the proliferation of data create scenarios that are clearly not intuitive to the average person. There seems to be a tendency to sometimes attack/lecture less technically proficient observers, rather than try to more meaningfully communicate and get to the heart of the issue. Byrne connects the JSTOR situation to the very different realms of wikileaks, manning, music publishing, etc. For those who care about the rules governing information sharing, IP, etc, this begs the critical question of “how do we differentiate among these ideas, so they are not all muddled together in the public’s eye.”
willholloway 14y ago
Byrne is absolutely wrong in asserting that civil rights activists were always ready to accept their punishment readily. The weakest link in any civil rights case is always the defendant. Rosa Parks was not the first African-American women to refuse to give up her seat on a bus. The NAACP and the civil rights movement elevated that case to the national level precisely because she was the epitome of Middle Class Respectability that was the cornerstone of the NAACP's decades long, methodical legal battle against segregation. Parks was the right person to challenge that injustice because she was a middle class female mother figure. She was the right person precisely because the plan from the start was to fight her arrest in court. Neither Parks nor the NAACP ever intended for her to be a martyr rotting in prison. During the Chicago Seven trial Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin put the system on trial and made a mockery of the proceedings by coming to court wearing black robes. They screamed "in the halls of justice the only justice is in the halls" when Bobby Seale was tied, bound and gagged to a chair for interrupting the court repeatedly and defiantly. They made fun of the judge for having the same last name as Abbie Hoffman, and satirized the entire ordeal. Our justice system is so out of control that the difference between now and 1968 is in 1968 people were able to challenge prosecutions in court. The travesty of justice here is effectively, and I would argue unconstitutionally, denying Aaron the right to a trial by his peers by piling on obscene charges with effective life sentences. David Byrne is being far too quick to accept the bully prosecutor Ortiz's interpretation of events, and sadly "This must be the place" will never sound the same to me again. You can't just give out network wide free access to documents on public campuses and then claim that they are behind a paywall. Given a long enough lifespan Aaron could have sat in front of a computer in an MIT library and read millions of academic articles and his brain could have analyzed and processed that information, reached conclusions and shared them. There should be no discrimination against using computational power to bulk download and analyze information. Aaron wasn't even charged with disseminating the information he downloaded, because he never did. For all "The People" know he was going to analyze the JSTOR docs with machine learning. All he did was program a computer to do what a human could do, but faster. Aaron is dead, but it is society that is the biggest loser here. Any sane and rational system of government would have applied minimal judicial scrutiny to his actions and paid him large sums to make our economy and government more efficient and more fair.
- 14y ago
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
Civil Disobedience means accepting that what you are doing is illegal and dealing with the consequences. Period. "Fighting the system" is a different can of worms. Being a revolutionary is also different. But Civil Disobedience means that you put civility -- the willingness to not fight -- at the same level as your moral outrage. Civil Disobedience is doing the right thing, being willing to take the consequences without a fight, and daring the public to put up with such an immoral system. The person who is being disobedient is asking "How can our society continue in a practical way when we treat people this way?" It's both a moral and a practical question. It's not just outrage. It's an important distinction. I'm fine with revolutionaries, after all, the U.S. started with a revolution. But we were very clear in the Declaration of Independence the reasons for our taking up arms. We had a job to do, and the king had a job to do. The king wasn't doing his, and after trying our best to meet his demands, power then reverted to the natural legislature of the people. This wasn't a moral crusade. This was a reluctant servant taking the only action possible. If you want a moral crusade and a revolution, then you have to answer one key question: what makes you so right? After all, if we're talking morals, other people have morals too, and I betcha they're not going to agree with yours. What do we do? All get clubs and run out into the street and whoever wins gets to decide what's right? Been a lot of that going around, and it never ends well. Majorities don't decide the correct construction of a society that's going to last. All they get to do is bully folks into getting their way. I can't make a call on Aaron because I have no idea what his intentions were, and the story never finished. So the reader is free to add whatever he would like onto it (one of the reasons it is so powerful, probably) But I know from Civil Disobedience. Powerful concept. Poorly understood. ADD: Was going to link to MLK's letter from a Birmingham Jail, but that might derail us. MLK put this in religious terms, "So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?", but the core of the question in my mind is not religious, it is this: how are we all going to continue getting along together if things continue like this?
- mistermann 14y ago
  > If you want a moral crusade and a revolution, then you have to answer one key question: what makes you so right? This is a very good question, the article asked a similar question: >But who then decides what data “deserves” to be stolen and “liberated”? How about we have an honest, uncensored, long running if necessary, public debate about these matters, involving academics and yes, even the public. I almost think politicians should be explicitly excluded as they are largely, let's say, "compromised", or at the very least have repeatedly proven incapable of acting like informed responsible adults. Let's set some ground rules for discussion, such as for starters, no lying or half-truths. When someone lies, it goes on their record so their future statements can be judged based on their past actions. The concept of "character" is traditionally used to serve this purpose, but in the modern age I don't think this low tech approach is cutting it. (If we could do something just to stop the lying and disingenuousness, you'd have half the battle won.) Lay out the options, list the advantages, disadvantages, and costs. If the various sides "can't agree" on these, fire them and get new ones. Then, let the public decide. This probably sounds a lot like the role democracy is supposed to serve, but are there really any serious people out there that would claim the present form of democracy, in most any country, even remotely resembles in practice what it is supposed to be in theory. All of this will require money and technology, so fund it with tax dollars. Yes, it will be difficult, it will require much discussion, compromise, and innovative thinking, but it's far from impossible.
amouat 14y ago
Umm, why was the title renamed? There is now no indication it refers to Aaron Swartz at all - the main reason I submitted it.
javajosh 14y ago
This article sparked a tangential thought: Why do academics agree to participate in this farce? Why, in this age of incredibly easy-to-share information, do they not simply publish their work themselves (put a PDF on a server somewhere!)? Barring that, why don't universities, all of which have fairly sophisiticated IT departments, host their own researchers results free-of-charge? Clearly doing research as an academic means swallowing a poison pill. I ask these questions because a lot of what we do here is similar to what a computer science researcher does. But since we don't answer to anyone, we can publish our results on git hub or a blog, or on jsfiddle or on blo.cks.org. Which of course begs the question[1]: why purpose do traditional journals even serve? If the content is contributed, and the editing is contributed, is the only thing they contribute the use of the trademark on the journal publication? This is an important question to ask because it seems to me if we gave academics another, better publishing method they'd probably take it.
- angersock 14y ago
  I would suggest pecuniary rather than moral reasoning, and a sense of duty to the job rather than the civilization. I don't think that many "academics" (quotes do to the varied nature of the groups under that label) feel a particularly strong duty to "do the right thing" about spreading knowledge especially if it may cost them their funding or job.
- aristus 14y ago
  Because career advancement requires publication in peer-reviewed, quality journals in a relevant field. The people at the top aren't generally keen to delegitimize the reason they are at the top. :) It's hard to fight that battle on top of all the other maneuvering and petty bullshit an academic already has to put up with. This is why open-access tend to be sudden revolts of entire subfields. Everyone gets together and says, fuck it, we know how to judge ourselves, so let's stop signing over copyright.
saraid216 14y ago
This is probably the best primer I've ever read on civil disobedience: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/07/16/civil-disobedience-in-hazzard-county/ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/07/16/civil-di...
nickbauman 14y ago
Byrne seems to have not groked that Swartz had access to JSTOR legally, although from a different institution (Harvard, not MIT) and could have downloaded everything legally if he wanted to. The thinking is he went to MIT to make the act illegal; to make a statement. To be civilly disobedient. The problem is we now have a DOJ that has been corrupted by the PATRIOT act and its kin; with memos legalizing all kinds of state-sponsored acts that were unthinkable before 9/11. It's a different atmosphere than when the Pentagon Papers were leaked. We are moving swiftly towards a predator state; like China or Brazil. Swartz was probably reacting to that.
- bo1024 14y ago
  Good point. Also that Swartz's primary focus was not just on copyrighted materials (though those too), but also materials whose copyrights had been expired but were still hidden behind paywalls. To JSTOR's credit, they have been opening up access to such files since the incident, which is awesome. (On the other hand, most of JSTOR could be replaced by a dozen 2TB hard drives and a cable modem internet connection, so it's hard to understand what they charge so much for...but I digress.)
andkon 14y ago
Philosophy grad here, so bear with me. Byrne's point about "where one draws the line with 'higher morality' used as a justification for breaking the law" is deeply fucked up. He seems to be saying that civil disobedience is right if and only if the public sees an act of disobedience as a good cause. Quoth David Byrne: "In civil disobedience actions it’s critical how the acts play out in public—that the perception be that they have done good, not harm." That's messed up, yo, for a few reasons. But mostly: The public is a multi-faceted organism. Is 'the public' meant to be the majority? A consensus? The intelligentsia? Whatever answer you come up with, you end up with this: morality is dictated by 'the public.' Laws and actions therefore don't have any moral standing outside of the social context they're in. Morality isn't objective. That sends us down the path to moral relativism, which you may or may not have a problem with. However, if you're someone who supports the idea of civil disobedience, like David Byrne says he is, you should worry. If it turns out that what is moral is dependent on what is accepted by the public, then different groups have different moralities. You have no way of adjudicating between which group is right - you just say: "shit, you believe different things. I guess your beliefs are just as morally right as mine." That means that the South of 1830, where slavery was popular, was a fine and dandy and moral place. See how this looks like a load of shit now? The project of civil disobedience, then, stops being about actually doing what's right. It's about changing group attitudes towards X. Like gay marriage: if you want gay marriage to be moral, you change the beliefs of 'the public.' You stop fighting for what's moral - instead, you end up fighting for what your group says is moral. No one has the moral high ground; the winning group just ends up yelling louder. But that's completely backwards. People fight for gay marriage (or to stop abortion) because they believe those things are right. If they are right - that is to say, they're moral actions or whatever - then their rightness is what supports your beliefs. It may even turn out that you're wrong: you may have believed something because you thought it was moral, when in reality it was not. That happens. But what we should shrink from saying is that the public determines rightness. Because then there's no real way to be civilly disobedient. There's no point. You're not fighting for a good cause. You're just fighting, and there will never be a day when you can say that we now live in a more moral world.
davesque 14y ago
It's nice to see someone actually trying to think through the issue and consider both sides. Don't feel like I've seen a whole lot of that thus far.
droithomme 14y ago
Mr. Byrne's article starts with and promotes as true the prosecutor's claim that Mr. Swartz is a thief who "stole" a database, despite the fact that Mr. Swartz, both as a Harvard fellow, as a visiting family member of an MIT employee, and as a random member of the public visiting the MIT campus, had the legal right to access the JSTOR archive, and MIT was paying JSTOR hefty licensing fees for this access. The only stealing going on was JSTOR stealing the access that MIT legally paid for. It is infuriating that Mr. Byrne makes his argument based on questionable claims, but even more so that his blog has no comments permitted or contact info rather than to contact any of four sets of high paid lawyers that represent him.
mstauber 14y ago
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it. Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to have this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
mstauber 14y ago
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it. Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to have this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
nullc 14y ago
> While I can empathize both with academics who might either want to monetize their research or those who might want to make it freely available to all—the choice, ideally, should be the authors’ It's unfortunate to see that the author here wrote in such length about a subject that he is obviously pretty clueless about. The authors of academic publication do not receive royalties for their publications, peer reviewers are— likewise, unpaid peers—, as are many (though not all) journal editors. None of the people responsible for creating these works are getting paid. Their only choice in this process is the choice to publish with established and prestigious journals. The journals are what put up the paywalls— but in the US they don't have a lawful copyright interest in the works.
Tloewald 14y ago
Best article I've seen on the Swarz case. David Byrne is a national treasure.
martinced 14y ago
"The fact that, yes, he is also legally a thief, is almost never mentioned." First the very notion of being a "thief" when you copy 0's and 1's is still a heavily disputed by a lot of activists. So it is seen wrong by many to categorize this as "theft" when the owner still has its copy of the "item", just as it was seen wrong to prevent black people from sitting where white people were supposed to sit. Then and most importantly, there are now so many laws out there that basically anyone can be sent to jail for any bullshit reason. So I'm sorry but I'm not buying that argument where someone is "legally" a thief, public danger, etc. What interests me is if that law is just or not. Because there are many, many unjust laws which should really need a revamp.
shaaaaawn 14y ago
This conversation is extremely shortsighted. Activism isn't about individual acts, it's about ==knowing== the end result is far too valuable f
shaaaaawn 14y ago
The greater purpose isn't to be disobedient or revolt against the system; it's progress-- or in Aaron's case to build a semantic web (3.0). We're so quick to credit him for web 2.0 without realizing that many rules had to be broken to get here. Books were scanned, CD's were ripped, the system was pissed. The web will always be disruptive to the past; progressing it is not easy nor always legal; but it is right.

167 points by amouat 14y ago

I thought Swartz's issue was PUBLICLY funded research behind pay walls, not all research... David Byrne missed the boat on this one.

unreal37 14y ago
Not all of it is publicly funded. Perhaps very little of it.

cowsandmilk 14y ago

It seems to be that David Byrne isn't that familiar with Aaron Swartz's fight. He says: Withholding cancer research from academics who can’t afford access because a big pharmaceutical company “owns” the data doesn’t seem like a very morally defensible position—even if it is what the law might say is perfectly legal. I do not know what he is referring to here at all. (1) JSTOR likely does not have much cancer research in the journals it covers. (2) Publications are owned by publishers, not any "big pharmaceutical company". The "big pharmaceutical company" receives no payment from the purchase of articles, and in some cases has to pay to publish in the journal that then also requires assignment of the copyright and charges for access the content.

andrewcooke 14y ago
is that an important detail? his main point, it seems to me, is that when compared with other rights protesters, swartz fought going to jail. i don't know if that's true (and would black rights protesters have defended themselves legally if they had the means?), but it's an interesting point about tactics. more generally, even though it wasn't the most informed article, i thought it was interesting - a smart person trying to understand a complex situation, not afraid to point out problems, and not afraid to acknowledge the lack of clear answers.
- sp332 14y ago
  As far as I know, black rights protesters weren't charged with 13 felonies.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    They were, however, lynched, shot, beaten (sometimes to death) and illegally jailed.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - gyardley 14y ago
    They certainly weren't: http://www.splcenter.org/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-martyrs http://www.splcenter.org/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-...
  - objclxt 14y ago
    Firstly, civil rights protesters were charged with numerous crimes - not just related to the Jim Crow laws, but as part of an active campaign to silence them (Martin Luther King, for example, was charged with tax fraud by Alabama, which he was found innocent of). Secondly, I don't see the relevance of the number of felonies being charged at any one time. Many in the civil rights movement were repeatedly arrested, charged, and tried over many, many years. And many faced length sentences off only one or two charges. I'm not totally sure of the point you were trying to make, but if you're trying to equate Aaron Swartz's persecution with that of those in the civil rights movement then you're treading onto extremely shaky ground.
    - sp332 14y ago
      Here's the part of the comment I was replying to: compared with other rights protesters, swartz fought going to jail. Those protesters certainly "fought" whatever it was they were put through!
amouat 14y ago
I agree. I hesitated on submitting the article as several statements seem a bit uninformed. But it is an interesting article from a notable person.
- betterunix 14y ago
  What makes the article interesting is not the point that it makes, but the perspective that a musician would have on these issues. There seems to be this idea that academic publishing companies are like recording companies, and that researchers have the same relationship with publishers as musicians have with recording studios. His view of this issue is very much shaped by his profession.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago

> it seems he illegally hacked his way into an MIT database Rather, he improperly downloaded a large number of academic papers from JSTOR via MIT's network - papers that were publicly funded and were legally accessible to people on MIT's network, but which Aaron believed should be widely accessible to everyone. The prosecutor tried to bully Aaron into pleading guilty to an array of felony charges for the supposed crime of violating a TOS contract.

kyboren 14y ago
This. A thousand times: this. I really feel like this really cuts to the core of the problem with "cybercrime". The fact is, most people have absolutely no understanding of the technical details of the "crimes" most hackers carry out. Most distressingly, this seems to include public prosecutors and judges. I am not sure if this is a result of misapplied analogies, or "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", or something else, or some combination of the above. In any case, our biggest priority should not just be reforming the law to match a more careful and technically nuanced version of computer crime. Indeed, our greatest goal should be to expand public awareness and appreciation of what hackers are, what they do, and how they go about doing it. I intentionally use the ambiguous term, "hacker" here. Until people understand what is really going on, they will forever remain ignorant of the proper course of justice.
- RyanMcGreal 14y ago
  We can add the constant abuse of the terms "steal" and "theft", which make no sense when applied to the act of making a copy of a digital file.
  - cobrausn 14y ago
    To play devil's advocate here... Let's say I work a full day with the understanding that I will get paid for my efforts. The employer then refuses to pay me. It would not be uncommon for someone to say that the employer 'stole' from you, or call them a 'thief'. I could also see how many people would equate that to downloading a copy of something that required effort to produce and was being offered under specific terms. I could see how arguing about the verbage, to most people, is just an exercise in pedantry and (as far as they are concerned) misses the point.

thoughtcriminal 14y ago

He was, as I have read, a disturbed young man who maybe sadly wasn’t quite psychologically ready to be a Gandhi figure—should he have realized this ahead of time? This, to me, gets to the heart of the matter. Aaron meant well, but he lacked strategy and was unprepared for the psychological tactics of the DOJ. Especially since I've read from numerous sources he suffered depression. As the law was bearing down on him, he was fighting a battle within him. He had no refuge.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago
An essay by Aaron's girlfriend, Taren Strinebrickner-Kauffman: http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/42260548767/why-aaron-died http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/42260548767/why-aaron-died
- Kylekramer 14y ago
  While I respect her opinion and understand that she knew Aaron very well, I don't really see why we should trust her opinion on whether he was depressed. Way too close to the issue.
  - sp332 14y ago
    Depression is not (yet) characterized by any physical cause. The only definition of clinical depression is a set of behavioral symptoms. If he didn't have those symptoms (even in retrospect), then he wasn't depressed. "The diagnosis of major depressive disorder is based on the patient's self-reported experiences, behavior reported by relatives or friends, and a mental status examination." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_depression
    - Kylekramer 14y ago
      Sure, but you will never find a clinician who would base their depression diagnosis based only on behavior reported by a significant other. Especially immediately following a suicide.

ghiculescu 14y ago

This post reminded me of the Talking Heads song Listening Wind, which also seems to be about a "matyr". No doubt Byrne's opinions have changed a bit in the 30 years since be wrote it, though. http://xms.songmeanings.net/m/song/3530822107858498600/ http://xms.songmeanings.net/m/song/3530822107858498600/

geoka9 14y ago
Well, he also wrote such songs as Psycho Killer. Songs do not necessarily reflect their author's point of view. And there's also "Stop Making Sense" :)

betterunix 14y ago

Oh Mr. Byrne, you come from a different world. Having "doubts" that the authors of academic articles see "much of" a share of the money publishers or databases bring in suggests that there is some hope that we would see any of it. The reality is that almost nobody is paid for their articles, and almost nobody even expects to be. Often, the reviewers of articles -- the people who make journals worth reading at all -- are unpaid for that work. Even editors are often volunteers. I guess we cannot be surprised that a musician would have such a view of copyright. Of course, the article seems to go off the deep end at some points: "Imagine, as MIT seems to have briefly done, that it was the Chinese or North Koreans or some other entity stealing this data" Yes, imagine the horror if the Chinese or North Koreans were reading published scientific research. I am sure that the authors of these articles are terrified by the idea that people in China might learn from their work, thus explaining why they published in journals with a global reach.

frossie 14y ago
Just to be clear, not only do authors not get paid for journal articles, but it is not unusual that they have to pay to submit their articles (so-called "page charges"). Given that sometimes these researchers belong to organizations funded by the taxpayer, what you have is a situation where you, the taxpayer, are paying companies like Elsevier to profit from blocking access to publicly funded research.
- rayiner 14y ago
  No, you're paying Elsevier to digitize, index, catalogue, and host publicly funded research. None of that is free. People are free to pony up the money to create an alternate system, and researchers are free to use it. Nothing is stopping them from doing so. People continue to pay Elsevier, JSTOR, etc, because they value the convenience of using a system that's already established and widely used.
  - betterunix 14y ago
    "you're paying Elsevier to digitize, index, catalogue, and host publicly funded research" Really, is that what we are paying them for? Well that's interesting, because the next paper I submit, which I am preparing now, is written in LaTeX and is submitted electronically. In the LaTeX source, I have to write keywords and codes that classify the article. The article is hosted on my website, which is hosted on the university's computer. So remind me, what is the publisher being paid for?

danso 14y ago

> But back to civil disobedience. Swartz stole the material, pure and simple, and he seems to feel that he and others have, in this case, the right to steal because they are beholden to a higher moral standard. I am sort of fine with this if he’s willing to accept the consequences, as Ellsberg and the Civil Rights activists were. This argument has been used to discredit Aaron as an activist, and at worst, to paint him as a spoiled sissy. But I'm not so sure that Aaron should be judged as a civil rights activist because I don't think he intended to promote his cause with civil disobedience. Instead, I think Aaron seemed to care more about the successful dissemination of the information, with attention to his cause being the secondary objective. Or else why would he engage in such subterfuge to download from JSTOR, when he very well could've just walked into the MIT Library, shouted "FOR FREEDOM!" as he flipped on an AlienWare laptop and the scraper script? He masked his face, hid his laptop in the closet, because he wanted to actually get the data and disseminate it...the information itself was the greater good, it seems. Unlike MLK Jr., who wanted to get arrested to bring attention to the plight of minorities, getting arrested would prevent Aaron from actually distributing the academic information. Ironically, if Aaron had acted like a MLK Jr. of Information Rights, people would be ripping on him as a showboat. One of the interesting anecdotes that came from his memorial was from someone who had asked Aaron to deliver the keynote at F2C2012. The person had expected Aaron to talk about the JSTOR incident in order to raise awareness for his cause, but instead, as you probably know, Aaron chose to talk about how the people stopped SOPA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg When Aaron pitched his fundraising drive on HN, IIRC, he didn't put much of an effort, even after he received a huge amount of criticism. Maybe Aaron was just awful at PR in general, but I don't think someone of his skill in civic activism would've come so unprepared to beat the drum if beating the drum was his real objective. So yes, Aaron deserves some criticism for thinking he could get away with it and for not planning for the worst-case scenario. But to say that he's a wimpy hypocrite for not accepting the jail time for his moral stand seems to miss the point...taking the moral stand seemed secondary to him in comparison to the greater good of spreading information. And to imply that he was cowardly misses the fact that not too long ago, Aaron was subjected to FBI surveillance for doing something that was undoubtedly legal when he "freed" the PACER archives. That he so quickly jumped back into the fray after that -- nevermind the work he did in raising awareness against SOPA -- strikes me as being pretty brave, if reckless, as far as tech-revolutionists go.

per 14y ago

Mr. Byrne adds a different perspective to this story, connecting it with historic fights for liberty. I welcome his openness, perspective and humble attitude. Since he doesn't have an emotional or industrial connection to Aaron Swartz he can enable a wider discussion around the issue of liberating information, copyright and open source.

icambron 14y ago

This article makes little sense to me. Really, civil rights activists shouldn't have fought going to jail over having sat at the front of the bus? Letting the government run them over was the right thing to do? No, the answer is to fight in any venue you can, and the court is a perfectly reasonable one to do it in; that's a major way that laws and their interpretations get changed. In fact, an activist defending herself in court is exactly how buses eventually got desegregated.[1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browder_v._Gayle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browder_v._Gayle Questions of strategy aside, Byrne is a little too quick to buy the government's story that a crime was actually committed, and much too loose with the words "theft" and "hacking", and of course the stuff about "our security" is nonsense. Swartz could not, should not have expected to go to jail for what he did. That the civil rights protesters expected and received jail time for straightforward violations of law may make them more powerful heros in Byrne's eyes, and that's fair enough (leaving the importance of their respective causes aside -- I'm not the one making this comparison). No one is claiming Swartz is today's Rosa Parks. But it doesn't make Swartz's actions less just and his persecution less unjust.

peejaybee 14y ago
Damn right. I've always rejected the notion that civil disobedience precludes defending yourself in court, especially when the authorities come at you with felony charges. It's a little too convenient for the authorities, in my opinion.
unreal37 14y ago
No I think his point was that Swartz was trying to "get away with it" in his actions during the MIT incident (hiding his face from the cameras, etc), and wasn't prepared to be caught. Clearly, he wasn't willing to plead guilty or do any jail time. In most of the other examples (Pentagon Papers, Bus desegregation), the people were prepared to be caught and wanted to highlight the immorality of the law. They weren't sneaking onto the bus.
- popee 14y ago
  Get away with what? Isn't MIT network open and isn't JSTOR allowing everyone from that network to download articles? I'm really not informed about this, so please inform me. On the other side it looks like witch hunt from the start.

largesse 14y ago

He seems to have his facts wrong. Swartz did have legal access to the articles. He merely used an alternative mechanism for acquiring them quickly.

unreal37 14y ago
So breaking into a cabinet in the basement of MIT was legal? And when he hid his face with his bike helmet, he did that even though he knew he wasn't doing anything illegal? I think even Aaron Swartz knew he was breaking some law at the time he was doing it, but at the same time the prosecutor was going after him for 35-55 years worth of jail time was clearly excessive meant to get him to plead guilty and not go to trial...

squozzer 14y ago

I don't disagree with Byrne's position on Swartz's actions. But Byrne's implicit comparison of the feds to Inspector Javert -- he might have done better to pay more attention to that facet of the case. Imagine whom the feds might have cut loose to make room for Mr. Swartz -- probably a killer or rapist. Based on incidents like these and others -- such as Tommy Chong's stretch in the poke for selling paraphenalia -- it's not hard to justify the hypothesis that the state jails hackers and paroles murderers to keep the rest of us in a state of perpetual, dependent fear.

akikuchi 14y ago

It is interesting to see the different reactions to this article. Byrne is clearly sympathetic to Aaron’s cause, and to the fact that civil disobedience and other sometimes subversive methods can be effective in dealing with injustice. There seem to be many comments attacking him for various minor gripes, choice of language, his incomplete understanding of the situation, etc. But that seems to miss the point. He’s ultimately asking how did this end up so wrong, and what can we learn from this tragic situation. How far should someone need to be prepared to go when taking a stand? How might more effective publicity/messaging have furthered the cause or helped prevent the judicial process from spiraling out of hand. Technical advancement and the proliferation of data create scenarios that are clearly not intuitive to the average person. There seems to be a tendency to sometimes attack/lecture less technically proficient observers, rather than try to more meaningfully communicate and get to the heart of the issue. Byrne connects the JSTOR situation to the very different realms of wikileaks, manning, music publishing, etc. For those who care about the rules governing information sharing, IP, etc, this begs the critical question of “how do we differentiate among these ideas, so they are not all muddled together in the public’s eye.”

bo1024 14y ago
He definitely makes many great connections to the larger picture. The problem is that he gets many of the ideological details wrong, which is really unfortunate as it leads to potential misjudgments of Swaartz's cause. Specifically, 1. Swaartz did have legal access to all of these files. There was no "theft" involved (Byrne's statement, "Swartz stole the material, pure and simple", is a hefty misunderstanding). He was, however, exploiting a loophole. He also violated the website's terms of service and trespassed at MIT. 2. Byrne seems to be implying that Swaartz should have admitted he was wrong and accepted jail time or being a martyr. But at no time was Swaartz ever offerred a punishment within three orders of magnitude of any that fit the crime. Should Rosa Parks have plead guilty to carjacking? 3. Byrne seems to think that all of the articles in repositories like JSTOR are "proprietary". In fact, a huge number are not. They have expired copyrights and are public domain; this was a large part of Swaartz's cause. To JSTOR's great credit, they have been expanding access to these articles since Swaartz's arrest, so in that respect his civil disobedience got the message across. 4. Byrne treats academic research somewhat as a monetizable commodity, like music. But not only do academics not see a penny on publications, but more importantly, members of subscribing institutions already have free and unlimited access to read any of these articles. It is just individuals not connected to big universities who have to pay large amounts (and this hurts the authors, who want people to read their work). The justification for charging for access to papers is not to monetize them, but that it costs upkeep to host and organize them. But of course, a P2P distribution of torrents would go a long way toward solving this problem for free, making both the authors and readers happier (but not the middleman).

akikuchi 14y ago

willholloway 14y ago

Byrne is absolutely wrong in asserting that civil rights activists were always ready to accept their punishment readily. The weakest link in any civil rights case is always the defendant. Rosa Parks was not the first African-American women to refuse to give up her seat on a bus. The NAACP and the civil rights movement elevated that case to the national level precisely because she was the epitome of Middle Class Respectability that was the cornerstone of the NAACP's decades long, methodical legal battle against segregation. Parks was the right person to challenge that injustice because she was a middle class female mother figure. She was the right person precisely because the plan from the start was to fight her arrest in court. Neither Parks nor the NAACP ever intended for her to be a martyr rotting in prison. During the Chicago Seven trial Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin put the system on trial and made a mockery of the proceedings by coming to court wearing black robes. They screamed "in the halls of justice the only justice is in the halls" when Bobby Seale was tied, bound and gagged to a chair for interrupting the court repeatedly and defiantly. They made fun of the judge for having the same last name as Abbie Hoffman, and satirized the entire ordeal. Our justice system is so out of control that the difference between now and 1968 is in 1968 people were able to challenge prosecutions in court. The travesty of justice here is effectively, and I would argue unconstitutionally, denying Aaron the right to a trial by his peers by piling on obscene charges with effective life sentences. David Byrne is being far too quick to accept the bully prosecutor Ortiz's interpretation of events, and sadly "This must be the place" will never sound the same to me again. You can't just give out network wide free access to documents on public campuses and then claim that they are behind a paywall. Given a long enough lifespan Aaron could have sat in front of a computer in an MIT library and read millions of academic articles and his brain could have analyzed and processed that information, reached conclusions and shared them. There should be no discrimination against using computational power to bulk download and analyze information. Aaron wasn't even charged with disseminating the information he downloaded, because he never did. For all "The People" know he was going to analyze the JSTOR docs with machine learning. All he did was program a computer to do what a human could do, but faster. Aaron is dead, but it is society that is the biggest loser here. Any sane and rational system of government would have applied minimal judicial scrutiny to his actions and paid him large sums to make our economy and government more efficient and more fair.

14y ago

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

Civil Disobedience means accepting that what you are doing is illegal and dealing with the consequences. Period. "Fighting the system" is a different can of worms. Being a revolutionary is also different. But Civil Disobedience means that you put civility -- the willingness to not fight -- at the same level as your moral outrage. Civil Disobedience is doing the right thing, being willing to take the consequences without a fight, and daring the public to put up with such an immoral system. The person who is being disobedient is asking "How can our society continue in a practical way when we treat people this way?" It's both a moral and a practical question. It's not just outrage. It's an important distinction. I'm fine with revolutionaries, after all, the U.S. started with a revolution. But we were very clear in the Declaration of Independence the reasons for our taking up arms. We had a job to do, and the king had a job to do. The king wasn't doing his, and after trying our best to meet his demands, power then reverted to the natural legislature of the people. This wasn't a moral crusade. This was a reluctant servant taking the only action possible. If you want a moral crusade and a revolution, then you have to answer one key question: what makes you so right? After all, if we're talking morals, other people have morals too, and I betcha they're not going to agree with yours. What do we do? All get clubs and run out into the street and whoever wins gets to decide what's right? Been a lot of that going around, and it never ends well. Majorities don't decide the correct construction of a society that's going to last. All they get to do is bully folks into getting their way. I can't make a call on Aaron because I have no idea what his intentions were, and the story never finished. So the reader is free to add whatever he would like onto it (one of the reasons it is so powerful, probably) But I know from Civil Disobedience. Powerful concept. Poorly understood. ADD: Was going to link to MLK's letter from a Birmingham Jail, but that might derail us. MLK put this in religious terms, "So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?", but the core of the question in my mind is not religious, it is this: how are we all going to continue getting along together if things continue like this?

mistermann 14y ago
> If you want a moral crusade and a revolution, then you have to answer one key question: what makes you so right? This is a very good question, the article asked a similar question: >But who then decides what data “deserves” to be stolen and “liberated”? How about we have an honest, uncensored, long running if necessary, public debate about these matters, involving academics and yes, even the public. I almost think politicians should be explicitly excluded as they are largely, let's say, "compromised", or at the very least have repeatedly proven incapable of acting like informed responsible adults. Let's set some ground rules for discussion, such as for starters, no lying or half-truths. When someone lies, it goes on their record so their future statements can be judged based on their past actions. The concept of "character" is traditionally used to serve this purpose, but in the modern age I don't think this low tech approach is cutting it. (If we could do something just to stop the lying and disingenuousness, you'd have half the battle won.) Lay out the options, list the advantages, disadvantages, and costs. If the various sides "can't agree" on these, fire them and get new ones. Then, let the public decide. This probably sounds a lot like the role democracy is supposed to serve, but are there really any serious people out there that would claim the present form of democracy, in most any country, even remotely resembles in practice what it is supposed to be in theory. All of this will require money and technology, so fund it with tax dollars. Yes, it will be difficult, it will require much discussion, compromise, and innovative thinking, but it's far from impossible.

amouat 14y ago

Umm, why was the title renamed? There is now no indication it refers to Aaron Swartz at all - the main reason I submitted it.

javajosh 14y ago

This article sparked a tangential thought: Why do academics agree to participate in this farce? Why, in this age of incredibly easy-to-share information, do they not simply publish their work themselves (put a PDF on a server somewhere!)? Barring that, why don't universities, all of which have fairly sophisiticated IT departments, host their own researchers results free-of-charge? Clearly doing research as an academic means swallowing a poison pill. I ask these questions because a lot of what we do here is similar to what a computer science researcher does. But since we don't answer to anyone, we can publish our results on git hub or a blog, or on jsfiddle or on blo.cks.org. Which of course begs the question[1]: why purpose do traditional journals even serve? If the content is contributed, and the editing is contributed, is the only thing they contribute the use of the trademark on the journal publication? This is an important question to ask because it seems to me if we gave academics another, better publishing method they'd probably take it.

angersock 14y ago
I would suggest pecuniary rather than moral reasoning, and a sense of duty to the job rather than the civilization. I don't think that many "academics" (quotes do to the varied nature of the groups under that label) feel a particularly strong duty to "do the right thing" about spreading knowledge especially if it may cost them their funding or job.
aristus 14y ago
Because career advancement requires publication in peer-reviewed, quality journals in a relevant field. The people at the top aren't generally keen to delegitimize the reason they are at the top. :) It's hard to fight that battle on top of all the other maneuvering and petty bullshit an academic already has to put up with. This is why open-access tend to be sudden revolts of entire subfields. Everyone gets together and says, fuck it, we know how to judge ourselves, so let's stop signing over copyright.

saraid216 14y ago

This is probably the best primer I've ever read on civil disobedience: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/07/16/civil-disobedience-in-hazzard-county/ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/07/16/civil-di...

nickbauman 14y ago

Byrne seems to have not groked that Swartz had access to JSTOR legally, although from a different institution (Harvard, not MIT) and could have downloaded everything legally if he wanted to. The thinking is he went to MIT to make the act illegal; to make a statement. To be civilly disobedient. The problem is we now have a DOJ that has been corrupted by the PATRIOT act and its kin; with memos legalizing all kinds of state-sponsored acts that were unthinkable before 9/11. It's a different atmosphere than when the Pentagon Papers were leaked. We are moving swiftly towards a predator state; like China or Brazil. Swartz was probably reacting to that.

bo1024 14y ago
Good point. Also that Swartz's primary focus was not just on copyrighted materials (though those too), but also materials whose copyrights had been expired but were still hidden behind paywalls. To JSTOR's credit, they have been opening up access to such files since the incident, which is awesome. (On the other hand, most of JSTOR could be replaced by a dozen 2TB hard drives and a cable modem internet connection, so it's hard to understand what they charge so much for...but I digress.)

andkon 14y ago

Philosophy grad here, so bear with me. Byrne's point about "where one draws the line with 'higher morality' used as a justification for breaking the law" is deeply fucked up. He seems to be saying that civil disobedience is right if and only if the public sees an act of disobedience as a good cause. Quoth David Byrne: "In civil disobedience actions it’s critical how the acts play out in public—that the perception be that they have done good, not harm." That's messed up, yo, for a few reasons. But mostly: The public is a multi-faceted organism. Is 'the public' meant to be the majority? A consensus? The intelligentsia? Whatever answer you come up with, you end up with this: morality is dictated by 'the public.' Laws and actions therefore don't have any moral standing outside of the social context they're in. Morality isn't objective. That sends us down the path to moral relativism, which you may or may not have a problem with. However, if you're someone who supports the idea of civil disobedience, like David Byrne says he is, you should worry. If it turns out that what is moral is dependent on what is accepted by the public, then different groups have different moralities. You have no way of adjudicating between which group is right - you just say: "shit, you believe different things. I guess your beliefs are just as morally right as mine." That means that the South of 1830, where slavery was popular, was a fine and dandy and moral place. See how this looks like a load of shit now? The project of civil disobedience, then, stops being about actually doing what's right. It's about changing group attitudes towards X. Like gay marriage: if you want gay marriage to be moral, you change the beliefs of 'the public.' You stop fighting for what's moral - instead, you end up fighting for what your group says is moral. No one has the moral high ground; the winning group just ends up yelling louder. But that's completely backwards. People fight for gay marriage (or to stop abortion) because they believe those things are right. If they are right - that is to say, they're moral actions or whatever - then their rightness is what supports your beliefs. It may even turn out that you're wrong: you may have believed something because you thought it was moral, when in reality it was not. That happens. But what we should shrink from saying is that the public determines rightness. Because then there's no real way to be civilly disobedient. There's no point. You're not fighting for a good cause. You're just fighting, and there will never be a day when you can say that we now live in a more moral world.

davesque 14y ago

It's nice to see someone actually trying to think through the issue and consider both sides. Don't feel like I've seen a whole lot of that thus far.

droithomme 14y ago

Mr. Byrne's article starts with and promotes as true the prosecutor's claim that Mr. Swartz is a thief who "stole" a database, despite the fact that Mr. Swartz, both as a Harvard fellow, as a visiting family member of an MIT employee, and as a random member of the public visiting the MIT campus, had the legal right to access the JSTOR archive, and MIT was paying JSTOR hefty licensing fees for this access. The only stealing going on was JSTOR stealing the access that MIT legally paid for. It is infuriating that Mr. Byrne makes his argument based on questionable claims, but even more so that his blog has no comments permitted or contact info rather than to contact any of four sets of high paid lawyers that represent him.

mstauber 14y ago

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it. Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to have this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.

mstauber 14y ago

nullc 14y ago

> While I can empathize both with academics who might either want to monetize their research or those who might want to make it freely available to all—the choice, ideally, should be the authors’ It's unfortunate to see that the author here wrote in such length about a subject that he is obviously pretty clueless about. The authors of academic publication do not receive royalties for their publications, peer reviewers are— likewise, unpaid peers—, as are many (though not all) journal editors. None of the people responsible for creating these works are getting paid. Their only choice in this process is the choice to publish with established and prestigious journals. The journals are what put up the paywalls— but in the US they don't have a lawful copyright interest in the works.

Tloewald 14y ago

Best article I've seen on the Swarz case. David Byrne is a national treasure.

martinced 14y ago

"The fact that, yes, he is also legally a thief, is almost never mentioned." First the very notion of being a "thief" when you copy 0's and 1's is still a heavily disputed by a lot of activists. So it is seen wrong by many to categorize this as "theft" when the owner still has its copy of the "item", just as it was seen wrong to prevent black people from sitting where white people were supposed to sit. Then and most importantly, there are now so many laws out there that basically anyone can be sent to jail for any bullshit reason. So I'm sorry but I'm not buying that argument where someone is "legally" a thief, public danger, etc. What interests me is if that law is just or not. Because there are many, many unjust laws which should really need a revamp.

shaaaaawn 14y ago

This conversation is extremely shortsighted. Activism isn't about individual acts, it's about ==knowing== the end result is far too valuable f

shaaaaawn 14y ago

The greater purpose isn't to be disobedient or revolt against the system; it's progress-- or in Aaron's case to build a semantic web (3.0). We're so quick to credit him for web 2.0 without realizing that many rules had to be broken to get here. Books were scanned, CD's were ripped, the system was pissed. The web will always be disruptive to the past; progressing it is not easy nor always legal; but it is right.