
Civil Disobedience - amouat
http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2013/02/020513-civil-disobedience.html
======
icambron
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>

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.

~~~
unreal37
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
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.

~~~
unreal37
So I'm paraphrasing David Byrne's argument here.

But when Rosa Parks sat down on the bus that day, she was sitting in the black
section. When the white section filled up, she was asked to move back some
more and she refused. The police were called. They came and arrested her. She
understood during this whole time that she would face prosecution and
punishment, but she was doing what she believed was right. She fought the
punishment in a very public way, and she became a symbol of the overall
struggle through that.

Mr Swartz on the other hand was trying to be anonymous about his actions while
he was doing them. Even though he was affiliated with Harvard and Harvard had
access to JSTOR, but traveled to MIT specifically to use their network for
this. He started taking the documents by WiFi, and when that was blocked, he
found a closet in the basement to plug his laptop and external hard drive
into. His program was designed to download the document slowly, to avoid being
so obvious to be caught. He snuck in and out of MIT each day to swap hard
drives, sometimes hiding his face from cameras. Much of what he did during
this time was trying to avoid being caught. When caught, he gave back the data
immediately and agreed never to release it. He was quiet about his legal
struggle over the 2 years, not really pounding the drum to try to get
attention to the injustice. Didn't blog about the case specifics, didn't do
media interviews. Apparently he was trying to keep quiet about it not to upset
the prosecutor. He was trying to convince prosecutors to drop the case
entirely.

It's a subtle point perhaps, but Byrne is saying Swartz was not prepared for
the consequences of his actions whereas other people fighting injustice
usually are. After his arrest, he was not fighting publicly to rally support
for what he did, but rather just trying everything he could to avoid
prosecution.

I wonder if Swartz would have said he regretted the whole JSTOR incident
before he died. Certainly Rosa Parks would not have regretted refusing to move
seats, even if she landed in jail from it.

~~~
icambron
I think you put the argument better than Byrne did, but I have several
problems with it.

First, in terms of sneaking around, remember that Swartz's goal wasn't to
ensure that his children and grandchildren could enter MIT server closets and
jump on the network whenever they want. It was to download and publish the
contents of JSTOR, and to complete that he had to make sure his activities
weren't cut short by discovery. He was basically still trying to _board_ the
bus. And to the extent that he used inappropriate means to reach his goal, we
should condem him for it, but using questionable methods doesn't make it not
civil disobedience. So the whole sneaking thing seems like a red herring.

Second, a huge part of this is that Swartz's could not have expected to face
the railroading he did. The requirement that you accept the consequences of
your civil disobedience isn't completely open-ended, so this matters a great
deal. I can't pretend to know if he would have been willing to face some more
proportional fallout for his actions, but it's unfair for us to assume he
wouldn't just because the trumped-up charges proved to be too much. Take this,
for example:

> Certainly Rosa Parks would not have regretted refusing to move seats, even
> if she landed in jail from it.

But what if they charged her with sedition and threatened to execute her? Of
course I don't know what she'd have done, but the question is whether we'd
think less of her if she backed down. "Well, that's civil disobedience for ya.
Gotta accept the consequences." If that seems like an extreme analogy, let's
look at it the other way: while Swartz's and Parks' actions were, in absolute
terms, more or less on-par, Parks' was obviously way more--for lack of a
better word--outrageous relative to the established power structure. She was
facing down a much larger, more deeply seated, more sinister set of rules and
was pursuing a much loftier cause; she was _a black woman doing as she pleased
in Alabama in 1955_. And still Swartz faced much nastier consequences. So it's
hardly fair to bash Swartz's unwilling to own up to the "consequences" of his
actions; they can't be what he bargained for.

Another way of approaching this is to note that we've been comparing Aaron
Swartz to _Rosa Parks and Mahatma Ghandi_ , freaking giants in the history of
civil disobedience. Is that really the standard we mean to set? You can't push
the ball forward unless you're willing to spend significant portions of your
life in jail? Gotta look unblinkingly into the eyes of false justice or accept
things the way they are?

~~~
unreal37
Good points. Byrne's argument is interesting but not completely solid. Plenty
of people doing civil disobedience don't want to be caught.

But if Swartz really believed in his cause, why did he give up on it so
easily? Why not release the data or go on TV anywhere and everywhere to talk
about the outrageous system that locks up research documents behind a paywall?

~~~
icambron
Yeah, that's a big question for me too. To speculate a little bit, the recent
Slate profile of Swartz paints him as impatient and mercurial, getting tired
of projects quickly and moving on, especially when he finds some aspect of it
painful or tedious. Nothing wrong with that in life, I think, but not a great
property in an activist. Maybe he just wasn't up for the fight? Edit: and I'll
give credit to Byrne on this point.

On the other hand, we should also remember that Swartz is human and not some
activist archetype. Sometimes life, shifting priorities, or personal issues
get in the way of our goals. Best laid plans, etc. That his followthrough
didn't match his initial stab doesn't make the initial stab wrong.

------
betterunix
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
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
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
"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?

~~~
rayiner
> So remind me, what is the publisher being paid for?

Nothing is stopping you from, you know, just not submitting your paper to
Elsevier. You could just put up a link on your blog or something. Whatever
thing it is that makes you submit to them instead of just doing that is what
Elsevier is being paid for.

~~~
betterunix
In other words, they are paid _because of the names of the journals they
publish_. Researchers rarely read bound copies of journals in this day and
age; it is faster to download the articles they want to read. My work _is_
published on my web page. I receive emails all the time about it, from people
trying to make use of it. At the last meeting for the grant I paid on, my
advisor and I were thanked by another research group for some of our work, and
for helping that group get our code to run. All of that, however, amounts to
nothing _if the work is not published in a prestigious journal_ (or in my
field, presented at a prestigious conference, but the conferences are run by
the same companies that publish journals and the proceedings are published in
the same fashion as journals).

Yes, that is how this works. A researcher with a good reputation in their
field, whose website provides quick and easy access to their work, has not
advanced their career at all unless their work is published in some set of
venues. This is not like interviewing for a tech company and giving them a
link to your github account or showing them examples of your code; your CV has
to contain a list of publications in major journals/conferences if you want to
get anywhere in academia. It all boils down to the _names_ of the journals.

So the next time you want to remind someone that Elsevier is paid for
_something_ , you can tell them the truth: Elsevier is paid for the names of
its journals.

~~~
rayiner
Okay, so you're paying Elsevier for lending you the weight of their brands,
because it's beneficial to you to do so. What's wrong with that? I paid a lot
of money to my undergrad and law school so I could put their brands on my
resume. Nobody forced me to do it--I did it because it was beneficial to me. I
don't see the problem with it.

Everyone pays for brands--it's why Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren, etc, still
exist in an industry where marginal costs are approaching nothing. Hell, even
tech companies pay for brands. They don't recruit at Berkeley and Stanford
just to get a look at peoples' github repositories.

Signaling, filtering, vetting, vouching are intrinsic to human society. There
is nothing coercive about what Elsevier is doing. They've built up brands
people trust and are making money providing the signaling services people
want.

~~~
Robin_Message
> They've built up brands people trust

TL;DR: No they didn't. Academics did, and publishers will wither away because
they add no value and have relatively little power over the academics upon
which they are parasites. I then break the law.

Certainly in computer science, it is not the publishers who have not built up
brands people trust (except ACM and possibly IEEE). Academics forming program
committees and organising the conferences have built up the trusted brands.

Now, in the past, it made sense to get a publisher to produce paper
proceedings for attendees and distribute proceedings to libraries.

However, now publishers make very little contribution to conferences –
attendees all pay a significant fee to attend. The programme committee and
referees are not paid. The authors produce digital works (and the referees do
minor proof reading, not the publisher). Paper copies are often not
distributed. I've not been on a programme committee, but I'm pretty sure
publishers are adding no value whatsoever.

The reason this hasn't withered away already is that all universities pay for
access to all publishers so academics don't really see it as a problem; it's
easier to just stick to the status quo when it's not your rights being
violated.

But eventually, conference organisers will realise they can just tell Elsvier
or Springer or even the IEEE and ACM to get stuffed†. They'll then put the
proceedings on arxiv or some other free place (hell, just torrent them) and
merrily continue doing everything else exactly the same sans publisher.

Civil disobedience time: <http://robinmessage.com/wwv07.pdf> is a conference
paper I wrote. In order to participate in that conference, I was coerced into
giving my copyright to Elsvier. Note they did nothing to make it happen; it
was my work, and the work of the organising committee and referees. But I no
longer own the copyright to that paper, and so probably broke the law posting
it here.

† Interestingly, apparently all publicly funded UK research will soon be
required to be published somewhere open access, in direct violation of the
requirements of most publishers. So academics have a fun question to answer:
don't publish anywhere good, or break the law?

~~~
rayiner
You're dancing around the point. Nobody is forcing you to publish with
Elsevier, nobody is forcing universities to subscribe, nobody is forcing you
to go to conferences associated with them, etc. It all operates on the
academic industry voluntarily doing business with Elsevier. Presumably, if
they wanted to do business with someone else they would do so.

So what's the civil disobedience against? Where is the beef here, because I
don't see it.

~~~
Robin_Message
I'm not sure exactly what your disagreement is here, so sorry if what follows
just muddies the waters further.

Background: an academic must publish. It is their purpose. And they have
relatively little control over the venue they publish in - whatever happened
some time ago controls where they can have impact and gain kudos (and reach).

I think the practices of publishers are immoral. A large system, including
laws, the state, and various independent and dependent entities makes what
they do legal, and disobeying their rules illegal. I was not forced to publish
with Elsevier, but as mentioned above, neither did I have any realistic other
options. Vested interests are real, however much we would like to wish them
away.

To use an analogy: if bus companies were privately owned, and practiced
segregation (and sitting in the wrong place could be construed as criminal),
would it be civil disobedience to sit in the wrong place? After all, nobody is
forcing you to ride a particular bus. You could get together with other like-
minded people and form a new bus company. However, that is a serious
undertaking; we could just make segregation illegal instead.

In the same way, we could form lots of new journals and conferences which
would struggle to prominence; or we could make copyright assignment of
academic work illegal, at least for publicly funded research. Don't forget
that copyright is at the gift of the state; it is not a natural right but a
constructed one; and without the state enforcing it would be significantly
weaker.

Summary: Some acts are so immoral that the state makes them illegal, even
between consenting entities. In my opinion, what one might call copyright
theft, as practised by publishers upon academics, is one of those acts; yet
currently the law says I am the one in the wrong. Hence, civil disobedience:
active and professed refusal to follow a particular law because, like a bus, I
have very little choice about which one to get on (to publish in), but I'll
sit (put my paper) where I like once I'm on it.

------
akikuchi
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
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).

------
DanielBMarkham
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
> 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.

~~~
damncabbage
> _... no lying or half-truths._

So who gets to decide what's a half-truth, a lie by omission, or just well-
intentioned but insufficiently detailed?

~~~
mistermann
Most things are provably true/false, or not broken down into fine enough
detail.

In the minority of situations where it is genuinely indeterminate, you come to
a consensus, just as happens between normal people millions of times each day
on this planet.

Part of the problem is, politicians routinely pass legislation they _know_ is
wrong, knowing they can hide behind the "we didn't know, our intentions were
in the right place" argument later because they know they will be let off the
hook, even though everyone knows they are lying.

Governance has become such an "emperor has no clothes" scenario, where lying
with impunity isn't given a second thought - no one would have believed you if
you had predicted this state of affairs 100 years ago.

Processing all these lies on an ongoing basis sounds impossible, but if the
media and the public actually started outing politicians and executives for
their lying, they would stop doing it so much, making verification of genuine
uncertainties much easier.

------
RyanMcGreal
> 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.

~~~
BenoitEssiambre
People are way too hasty to label Aaron Swartz action as hacking, thieving or
any word with illegal connotations. It is well known that Aaron by way of his
associations with MIT had the right to download JSTOR articles there. All he
did was to create a simple program that exploited his access with a program
that went through the motions of downloading automatically instead of having
to manually click on each articles. This is not hacking. It is a very common
type of script used by software developers all the time. He already had legal
access. He only accelerated the downloading of articles.

People have been attributing the fact that Aaron tried to hide his actions on
the MIT campus as a sign that he knew what he was doing was illegal. I believe
it is actually a sign of the opposite. All parties thought that the
downloading he was doing was probably legal (or at least a gray area).
However, it broke some Terms of Service agreement (you know the long documents
you have to press 'accept' to when you want to install software). Everyone
involved knew that, since they didn't have a good legal defense, the only
thing the university could do to stop him using their network in a way that
they didn't like was to physically stop him and kick him off campus as a
trespasser. Therefore he had to hide from them to avoid this. It wasn't right
for him to trespass and ignore Terms and Conditions but it certainly shouldn't
have been a felony.

Why do I believe that Aaron thought what he was doing was legal? Aaron was not
a naive person when it came to laws. Exhibit A: The amount of books Aaron read
and reviewed, often more than 100 per year! If you look at the list there are
lots of them on politics, economy,philosophy and law (
<http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2010> ).

Take a glance at Aaron's last blog post which is a review of a Batman movie.
It is all about the strategic uses of game theory to affect the balance of
powers in the legal and political system
(<http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/tdk>). He seemed to have a very keen eye that
saw all the weird ways laws and powers can flow in political systems.

It seems that Aaron was not trying to hack computer code but instead hack
legal code. That is find legal means (or at least gray areas) that he could
then exploit politically. Once he had the articles, he probably intended to
release them publicly and confront the courts where he thought he could set
favorable precedents for information freedom (like he had done in the past).
He probably wanted to get caught for the act of releasing the articles but
that required him not to get caught trespassing for a while.

Aaron's misjudgment was that he would face a legal challenge in broken but
still somewhat reasonable copyright laws and maybe some kind of trespassing
violation (and the civil disobedience would be on the level of trespassing)
when instead he was confronted with completely disproportionate and
unreasonable Anti-Hacking laws meant to deter terrorists from penetrating
vital systems. These laws were way too broad by stating that anything that
violates Terms and Condition (something that most people do) can be considered
a felony. That is what is supposed to change with Aaron's law
([http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/02/aarons-law-
amending...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/02/aarons-law-amending-the-
cfaa/))

I think Aaron's misjudgment was a perfectly understandable. My opinion is that
even MIT, in favoring prosecution, thought that he would face reasonable laws
and would get a slap on the wrist. That is why they didn't tell the DOJ to
drop the charges and are now internally investigating what happened.

~~~
Anechoic
_It is well known that Aaron by way of his associations with MIT had the right
to download JSTOR articles there._

He also had "legal" access through his fellowship at Harvard, he could have
downloaded his articles while at work.

~~~
FireBeyond
And I suspect that that is because he wanted to avoid the consequences if he
had done so at Harvard - certainly the evidence of hiding identity,
appearance, circumventing roadblocks to continue as he did would also point to
that.

------
cowsandmilk
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
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
As far as I know, black rights protesters weren't charged with 13 felonies.

~~~
objclxt
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
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!

------
per
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.

------
nickbauman
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
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.)

------
squozzer
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.

------
nullc
> 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.

------
droithomme
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.

------
willholloway
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.

~~~
TheCondor
How was he denied a trial? Is this the logical extension that the jeopardy was
so great he'd be "forced" to plea?

If there was purely logical thinking going on, push it to a trial, if he won
then he'd set an example for all future hackers. If he lost and was rationally
willing to kill himself rather than go to prison, that would have still been
an option, if prison was even on the final table.

~~~
willholloway
Yes, I believe the jeopardy he was facing was in effect a denial of the right
to a fair and speedy trial.

In comparison, Rosa Parks only spent 1 night in jail, and was released on
bail. Her trial lasted 30 minutes and she was fined $14.

Yes I am comparing anecdotes, but its important to note the length of prison
sentences has been greatly increased since the 60's. The active discouragement
of jury nullification makes civil disobedience more dangerous as well.

In my opinion judges and prosecutors are being given too much power for a
democratic society to abide.

------
javajosh
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.

~~~
aristus
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.

------
ghiculescu
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/>

~~~
geoka9
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" :)

------
danso
> _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>

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.

~~~
Nelson69
So he wasn't taking a moral stand? But he believed he was doing something for
the greater good and took some measures (albeit small ones) to avoid being
'caught.' He didn't do it from his "home network" at Harvard.

So JSTOR is basically a library and they do business with libraries and have
some fees but access it generally free and affordable in a lot of contexts.
I'm not aware that they restrict access to things. What exactly was the
greater good? He just didn't like JSTOR's terms and the fees? Or was there
something else? It just wasn't "free enough?"

And MLK Jr's name is being tossed around? Are we serious?

------
andkon
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.

------
saraid216
This is probably the best primer I've ever read on civil disobedience:

[http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/07/16/civil-
di...](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/07/16/civil-disobedience-
in-hazzard-county/)

------
shaaaaawn
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.

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

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

------
davesque
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.

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

------
davemel37
I thought Swartz's issue was PUBLICLY funded research behind pay walls, not
all research... David Byrne missed the boat on this one.

~~~
unreal37
Not all of it is publicly funded. Perhaps very little of it.

------
mstauber
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.

------
thoughtcriminal
_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
An essay by Aaron's girlfriend, Taren Strinebrickner-Kauffman:

<http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/42260548767/why-aaron-died>

~~~
Kylekramer
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
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>

~~~
Kylekramer
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.

------
martinced
_"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.

------
largesse
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
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...

