You should care. The Left is leveraging Swartz to try to kill intellectual property law, emotionalizing this guy’s story to try to sway public opinion against copyright.

Ah. Could be. Sorry if I misunderstood.

The Swartz death/suicide was a tragedy.

Not only completely disrespectful to Swartz’s family and friend, your diary reeks of intellectual envy. Swartz had more talent in his scrawny finger than you will ever imagine.

Yeah….he did a stupid thing. He broke the law. And his decision to take his own life was stupid and sad.

But that doesn’t give you the right to run a victory lap around Swartz’s grave braying about the lightness of the sentence offered.

I’d say the actual answer is ‘losing it,’ but the anarcho-libertarians long since did that.

That is true. Both are the epitome of arrogance and think they are above the law type people.

On what do you base your second paragraph speculation? Swartz’s friends who defend him claim he died because he feared the prosecution.

It is news to me that he engaged in mass redistribution of these copyrighted works. Had he done so, the JSTOR archives would be all over the Internet or there would be running battles with Anonymous to spam them across the net and JSTOR issuing DMCA notices to take them down.

I see none of that.

So where did he redistribute?

Swartz was charged with several felonies for essentially abusing a special license that MIT had that allowed anyone to freely download JSTOR articles without paying for them. Had Swartz simply throttled his ‘bot to download at a slower pace, he’d have gotten the whole archive without any opposition.

Resetting your MAC address is not a crime.
Attaching to that MIT network when you are not a student or faculty member is not a crime (MIT purposefully keeps the MIT network very loosy goosey on security to facilitate access for visitors).
Downloading a JSTOR article from that network is not a crime.
Not paying for a JSTOR article when downloading from that network is not a crime.

When does repeatedly engaging in acts that are not crimes turn into crime? That’s actually an interesting legal question and a very good case can be made for “never” being the correct answer. In fact, I think that a pretty good case can be made that “never” is the conservative answer.

If I go onto a university campus and latch onto an open wifi network and download a JSTOR article that is free for use, what crime have I committed? I’ve been given scientific papers by authors who have submitted to JSTORS. Am I a felon? Is the author? How many times do I have to lather, rinse, and repeat the cycle before I become a felon?

I see no evidence that he was a sociopath. Misguided, yes. Sociopath – you’ve adduced no evidence of that.

You’re a moron who’s defending young punk anarchists, then.

G’bye.

Never mind. I don’t feel like tolerating your casual floating of dishonesty, when we both know I left nothing out.

Now that is funny. Don’t do the crime and that won’t be an issue. He did. He got caught. He was offered an excellent way out. One I think most criminals would think is a sweetheart deal. He chose not to accept it for some unknown reason. It was in fact a light sentence.

the was a multiple felon who tried to rob IP owners of millions of dollars worth of their property. Just because he was a self righteous asswipe doesn’t mean he gets a free pass.

The only disrespect was shown my Swarz himself who disrespected the law, other people’s property, and his own family and friends by killing himself. Suicide is the most selfish act possible. His followed his other selfish act of stealing other people’s property for his own aggrandizement.

Whiners, like other liberals, don’t let facts get in the way of their diatribes.

Has Ron Paul actually endorsed this kind of behavior? if so its just one more thing to ad to the ever growing list of disappointing Ron Paul moments

I’m with Bill S (who I think is a buddy of mine). I can’t clearly see the sarcasm in Viet71′s post. Oddly, I can understand both stances: that I should care, for the reasons stated; and, that I don’t care if this slug (Swartz) failed to see the gamble he took in refusing the plea bargain.

Sarcasm.

This.

I was basing it on this article, which contains many comments and emails from people who knew him, including his parents:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/03/11/130311fa_fact_macfarquhar

“Since his death, his family and closest friends have tried to hone his story into a message, in order to direct the public sadness and anger aroused by his suicide to political purposes. … They tell people that the experience of being prosecuted is annihilatingly brutal, and that prosecutors can pursue with terrible weapons defendants who have caused little harm. One of the corollaries of this message is that Swartz did not kill himself; he was murdered by the government. But this claim is for public consumption, and the people closest to him do not really believe it. They believe that he would not have killed himself without the prosecutors, but they feel that there is something missing from this account—some further fact, a key, that will make sense of what he did.”

In particular, as the journalist shows, he often wrote to others, even on his blog, about self-destructive feelings, starting years before the JSTOR incident. So I’d say my comment wasn’t fully speculative.

There’s also ample evidence for the sociopath label – he dropped out of high school in 9th grade and Stanford after 1 year, in both cases largely (according to him) because he couldn’t stand being around other people. Not to mention his belief that laws shouldn’t apply to him.

Indeed. The above-banned TMLutas admitted as much when he previously called Swartz’s crimes “Civil Disobedience.”

Hmmm, when did resettng your MAC address to avoid a block become a crime? You are assuming fraud. That is called “circular reasoning” or “begging the question”.

Now, let’s assume that “slickdogsled” was banned. Depending on how he is banned, he an either change his user id or he can use a proxy to change his IP. Is that then fraud? I don;t think so.

I did not say that merely resetting your MAC address to avoid a block is a crime, nor am I assuming fraud. That Swartz reset his MAC address to get around a block shows that he knew he was accessing without authorization. The “fraud” was the theft of the articles by downloading them. The DOJ quotes from the Congressional Record regarding the requisite “fraud”: “The acts of fraud we are addressing in proposed section 1030(a)(4) are essentially thefts in which someone uses a federal interest computer to wrongly obtain something of value from another.” The articles were certainly something of value.

Regarding your hypothetical, it would not be “fraud” if I accessed RedState using a proxy after being banned, at least because I would not be taking “something of value from another.” (There are probably other reasons as well.)

thats why I never could consider voting for him, there were times he had clarity, like when he endorsed Ted Cruz, but most of the time it seemed he was pandering to the Howard Zinn crowd

I personally think 70 years isn’t long enough. If I create something I’d expect my heirs to benefit from that for as long as they can make a profit off it.

Please don’t use terms you don’t understand. “ad hominem

This is an opinion site, I get that. Everyone is free to their opinion (and some opinions are not welcome on this site – that’s fine.) However, the articles here also discuss objective facts. I doubt the author or other mods care, but I do think its important to distinguish between the facts in the case and your opinion.

In the opinion of most of the writers here at RedState, what Aaron Swartz did was a crime.

The fact is, he was alleged (by the prosecutor) to have committed certain crimes. Aaron denied that that was the case. Unfortunately for all parties, nothing was proven in a court of law. That leaves it inconclusive, but to state it as a foregone conclusion that he was guilty and a criminal is not stating the actual facts, its stating your opinion.

There are quite a few people who disagree with your opinion; some disagree because they are anarchists; some disagree because they genuinely believe that the legal case was bad to begin with and was manipulated by the prosecutor. See the Duke Lacrosse case. The CFAA law is far too ambiguous, but a court of law is not where to fix it.

That a Grand Jury indicted him means only that the prosecutor presented enough evidence that they agreed that the facts needed to be tried by the “finders of facts”, that is a jury. (As opposed to a finding of law, which can be decided by a judge.) In reality, I don’t think Grand Juries throw out very many cases – send it to the jury, let them weigh the facts. So that alone is inconclusive wrt to guilt and

The framers disagreed.

Of course they disagreed even more strongly with anarchists, having enshrined copyright in the Constitution.

Several issues with your claims:

1) No one has ever proven that felony *for this guy* was life-ruining. This is a guy who already had a fairly ruined resume. He didn’t “invent the RSS feed” (not true — he worked on an obscure and no longer used fork of it), or “founding Redditt” (not quite true, as his start-up was basically coerced into merging into the more superior Redditt by the funder of both, Paul Graham, and then Swartz was ultimately fired) — and there were lots and lots of failed projects, relationships, causes, etc. Swartz was not destined for any position in the White House, as he insanely seemed to think and as his friends seemed to nurtue in him insanely. Instead, his felony would make him a hero among the Mitch Kapor funded organizations like Electronic Frontier Foundation and Demand Progress — the actual jobs he had — and even an MIT-funded magazine (!) — and he would never, ever have hurt for a job. It’s just ridiculous to claim so. He also could have asked Obama to pardon him — and he might have been pardoned. So let’s knock it off with the “life-ruining” effects of a felony when the judge in this case ordered this defendant to seek mental health care — a fact never reported by the adoring tech press. Please.

2) Copyright law isn’t “simply” wrong and corrupt. John Perry Barlow is wrong and corrupt. When was the last time you need to use a Disney image in your artwork, mesocyclone? You are really suffering as an artist without this “innovation” — using the flotsam and jetsam of 20th century corporate culture to decorate your mash-up? Really? Gosh, I feel for you, but it’s still theft. You and Larry Lessig are trying to decouple the ability to commodify digital works from the bytes. The Berne Convention doesn’t let you do that. Creative Commons is a scam where nobody gets paid.

3) The CFAA, even if revised according to the EFF would not have saved Swartz. He was guilty of malicious hacking with over $5000 damages, end of story. Ask the MIT personnel who called the cops and didn’t fight for his exoneration. They’ll explain it to you. Read the New York Times on this and not TechDirt.

4) Over-criminalization? Oh, I don’t know. I’ll tell you what’s overly-criminalized — the entertainment and news industries’ efforts to secure their legitimate property rights — by people like you. They are legitimate; thieves are not. No one reporting this — because they are leftists or binary thinkers in the tech set — seemed to grasp that a press release about charges isn’t a sentence. As Eric Holder said, the government’s intent was never to give Swartzh more than 3-4-5 months. As he explained to the Silicon Valley-funded congress people drilling him on this in their business and political interests, he doesn’t look at the charges (the way they all did hysterically to lobby for their case), he looks at the *conduct*. The conduct was not so terrible because there wasn’t any monetary gain. But it was still a felony and still worth some jail time for this hero of the left.

5) If prosecutorial abuse is really the problem you think in this case, make the case. But so far, we’ve had gambits trying to defy Sanchez and other sillyness on this case that is a function of wishful thinking and the whole “Autonomous Zone” of code-is-law instead of the organic rule of law. Every single one of these people supporting Swartz and Swartz himself would take away rights from us, first of all the system of choices of commerce, whether pay wall or garden wall, on the Internet. I’m not for letting them do that. I want a free country with civil rights, not a revolutionary justice system run by a communist junta.

6) Of course Swartz engaged in mass enfringement. That’s why first JSTOR then MIT’s servers knocked him off. He used the system not as intended. Nobody “needs” 4 million documents unless they are in a Guerilla Manifesto mode, or trying to arrogantly “expropriate from the expropriators” to show some corporate conspiracy shill, like “OMGODZORZ all research is paid for by evil corporate machines blah blah” which is what he was likely hoping to do (and did before elsewhere).

You don’t really care about removing “abuses’ of copyright law but are looking for edgecasing and lawfaring to undermine it totally. So I’m totally unimpressed.

I don’t care if you are a “lifelong conservative and retired software engineer”. Your mind has been infected by the rampant technocommunism all around you in this field which passes for libertarianism among some who aren’t inquisitive enough.

The real battle of our time is between those who will stand for free enterprise, human rights, and choice on the Internet consistent with liberal beliefs and conservative beliefs, or those who will endorse technocommunism and technolibertarianism that undermine those central institutions. It really is about that.

Because it’s more than that. It’s going into a server closet on a campus where you have no pass, and a building where you are not authorized personnel, and jacking into the LAN — and hiding all this in multiple ways.

Agree with Mesocyclone.

I am a TEA party conservative who believes in smaller government and less nanny state. I am also an author, and a scientist and I believe there is a place for copyright and intellectual property. But the law has run amok.

JSTOR is an archive mainly of scientific articles, almost all of which were written at the expense of public funding. Copyright to these articles is then granted to those who distribute the articles. Why should a distributor hold copyright over publicly funded research?

This is a situation that has caused consternation worldwide, since distribution costs are extremely low, and yet scientists are charged very high prices to access these archives. It stands in the way of progress, and this is being redressed, but too slowly in the US.