I watched The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014) a number of years ago.
At the time there were nebulous threats floating in the ether about prosecuting people for illegal downloading. It was around the time that Pirate Bay (TPB) were getting a lot of coverage, they were the world’s largest illegal file sharing service on the Internet. Through the use of BitTorrents, TPB made it possible for users to exchange digital material including music and films.
Swartz was more concerned with the hoarding of academic knowledge. The idea of prosecuting someone for illegally ‘copying’ music or videos seemed preposterous as for downloading too many academic papers, come on! But of course if you consider those academic papers to be your property, and this property of yours is going to make you a big pile of money you are going to think about it in a different way.
The Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, which Aaron was one of the writers of, describes how a handful of corporations were digitising the worlds knowledge. They would lock it up and if you wanted access you would have to pay a lot of cash. Of course this proved absolutely prescient and now academic publishing is almost completely controlled by a number of large corporations. This market is largely dominated by five large publishing houses: Elsevier, Black & Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature and SAGE, which control more than 50 % of the world market between them. (Hagve / The money behind academic publishing/ 2020)
We live in a world where profit is king- the potential destruction of the worlds habitat, and the extinction of the human race is not enough to overturn this drive for accumulation so the ‘sacrifice’ of one young, idealistic man is is not going to be an issue. JSTOR released a statement in relation to the persecution that it was them put the American government pushing to prosecute Swartz. The documentary about Swartz shows how he felt hounded into killing himself at the age 26. He feared being sent to jail for up to 35 years for releasing academic papers using Massachusetts Institute of Technology servers to download information and material from JSTOR that he thought should be open to the public and not merely available for the privileged few. JSTOR is a digital library which charges subscription fees for libraries, universities and publishers to access its database of academic journals.
“It was the governments decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR’s. As noted previously, our interest was in securing the content. Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter.”
The government decided to make an example of Swartz- he potentially faced a very long prison sentence he faced 13 felony counts of hacking and wire fraud , which carried the possibility of decades in prison and crippling fines. He died before the case was heard.
I rewatched the film in the same week that I watched the film and came upon this quote from Jonathan Franzen in an article Sex with Satan by Deborah Friedellbook
“world’s first modern prison, opened in 1829, solitary confinement for up to twenty years, astonishing suicide rate, zero corrective benefit and just to keep this in mind still the basic model for corrections in the United States today.” ( Franzan writing about the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.)
This really resonated with me in relation to Swart’s fear of being jailed in the USA.
( https://inforrm.org/2013/03/22/case-law-court-of-human-rights-the-pirate-bay-v-sweden-copyright-versus-freedom-of-expression-ii-dirk-voorhoof-and-inger-hoedt-rasmussen/ )
Joshua A. Krisch These Five Corporations Control Academic Publishing
(https://www.vocativ.com/culture/science/five-corporations-control-academic-publishing/index.html )
Martin Hagve The money behind academic publishing
https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2020/08/kronikk/money-behind-academic-publishing
Sex with Satan byDeborah Friedellbook London Review of Books Oct 2021
(https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n20/deborah-friedell/sex-with-satan?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2)
