I want to respond to a couple of things mistermix wrote this morning about MIT’s response to Aaron Swartz’s death, but first, some preliminaries.
1: This topic has become a lightening rod for a stunningly unproductive comment war between those who see Swartz as presumptively criminal who couldn’t take the heat his own actions had invited, and those who see him as a martyr to the positive cause of internet and data freedom and to the defensive one of resistance to overweening corporate and government interests.
My own view is much closer to the side of those who see Swartz as a driven idealist, on the side of the angels, largely unprepared for real life. It’s overwhelmingly clear that he believed deeply in acting morally according to a particular moral code and that he was aware that this commitment could bring him into conflict with existing legal (and more everyday) constraints. It is clear, to me at least, that his goals, what he thought the good was for which he was willing to enter into such conflict, is in fact a major social benefit: information, if it doesn’t always want to be free* wants to be genuinely accessible — or rather, we as citizens, members of a polity that utterly depends on an informed electorate, need to have ready access to the words, numbers and wisdom required to perform our civic work. Does that mean Swartz or anyone else should get out of jail free when they challenge someone else’s intellectual property claims? No, and Swartz and his legal team did not seek do so, according to the Kevin Cullen/Boston Globe column to which mistermix linked. For those without access to the Globe, here’s the datum:
Swartz and his lawyers were not looking for a free pass. They had offered to accept a deferred prosecution or probation, so that if Swartz pulled a stunt like that again, he would end up in prison.
I have no problem with that proposed resolution; seems about right to me. Much more appropriate than this:
That said, YMMV, on either side. [much, much more past the jump].