A virtual war with real losses of life

**The suicide of internet activist and programmer Aaron Swartz earlier this month focuses our attention on two important recent trends – the rise of internet-driven transparency and open access to knowledge on the one hand, and the relentless marketisation of society, academia and public institutions on the other.**

Swartz was a vulnerable individual who wrangled with depression throughout his life, but he was also a genius and an asset to humanity, and to lose him at the age of 26 is an unspeakable tragedy. His family and friends blame the authorities in America who hounded him with charges carrying a combined sentence of up to 50 years in jail.

So, what was his crime? He downloaded scientific papers from JSTOR (the journal archive) using his MIT account with the intention of publishing them online. That is all. For those who are reading this and immediately respond with: “piracy will remove the incentive to carry out research”, you have missed the point – scientific papers are not comparable to media content downloaded illegally, privately produced for private profit – these were mostly the results of publically funded research. Other such “private property” which Swartz had “stolen” in the past included court rulings, and books from the Library of Congress, i.e. non-copyrighted content produced with government money.

While what he did may, technically, have been illegal, Swartz himself put it best in his own Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto: “The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations…There is no justice in following unjust laws.”
As with the case of another heroic individual, Pfc. Bradley Manning, the whistleblower who exposed many of the crimes of modern US foreign policy, we must focus on the principle underlying the action and the likely positive effects, rather than the question of legality.
Untrammelled authority must be challenged whether it is in the form of state power in the case of Bradley Manning or the corporate power represented by the “private theft of public culture”, that Swartz targeted – too often of course, to combat the latter will bring the wrath of the former. Power must be checked and it must be balanced by the work of citizens, activists and dissidents. The idea of operating within a rule of law is fine as long its strictures apply equally to the powerful so that it is possible to hold them to account using legal methods. If not, all bets are off.

Don’t forget about Aaron Swartz, a selfless martyr who sought only to share the world’s most valuable resource, the accumulated knowledge of mankind, with everyone.