Aaron Swartz and the cause of openness - Opinion - The Boston Globe

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-01-08

Summary:

"ONE YEAR ago, computer programmer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide in his Brooklyn apartment on the eve of his trial in federal court. He faced years in prison for using MIT’s open network to download millions of articles from JSTOR, a paid academic subscription service. From Congress to Twitter, Swartz’s death sparked outrage because of perceived overzealous prosecution. It highlighted a growing conflict between the ideals of Internet freedom and more assertive cyber-security demands by law-enforcement interests. As 'hacktivism' has become a resonant cultural theme since Swartz’s death, his actions have been conflated with those of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning. This misses something subtle and substantive about Swartz. His posthumous celebrity aside, two ideas that guided much of his short life’s work are worth considering: academic open access and open government. A powerful line of inquiry informed Swartz’s thinking: What should be in the public domain, and what might properly remain closed or proprietary? These are not abstract issues: Access to knowledge empowers people in a very real sense — and the lack of access disempowers them. Increasingly, the status of information becomes a question of equality, and a moral issue ..."

Link:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/01/08/aaron-swartz-and-cause-openness/z0YezDMOlhuZRaR3TlmQqO/story.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.advocacy oa.guerrilla

Date tagged:

01/08/2014, 18:36

Date published:

01/08/2014, 13:36