How things have (or haven’t) changed in Aaron Swartz’s absence |

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-01-28

Summary:

"When Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 11, 2013, he was facing up to 35 years in prison. Swartz was accused of using a laptop to make unauthorized downloads of more than four million academic articles from the nonprofit journal archive JSTOR. To accomplish this feat, he allegedly hid a laptop inside a closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (where he was not a student) for months, using a bicycle helmet to shield his face from any security cameras. When he was finally caught, and accused of planning to release the millions of documents for free online, JSTOR asked for the articles back and dropped the matter. To the confusion of some legal experts and activists, MIT and the office of U.S. attorney Carmen Ortiz did not. And so began a sequence of events that Swartz would refer to only as 'the bad thing,' and that some believe drove the 26-year-old programmer to kill himself. The issues at the heart of Swartz’s alleged crime and suicide — overly harsh sentences for computer crimes, open access of federally funded research, suicidal depression — reached heightened awareness online and in the media in the weeks after his partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kaffman, found him hanging in their New York apartment. In death, Swartz ignited a national conversation on some complicated issues. In life, he was known for trying to do this every day. Here’s what has changed — and what has not — in his absence ..."

Link:

http://jakenew.com/2014/01/27/how-things-have-or-havent-changed-in-aaron-swartzs-absence/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.advocacy oa.guerrilla oa.mit oa.jstor oa.litigation oa.legislation

Date tagged:

01/28/2014, 09:16

Date published:

01/28/2014, 04:16