WendyMcElroy.com | |
I don't know why the suicide of Aaron Swartz has affected me so strongly. Before last Friday, I didn't know his name, though I did remember his stunt of planting a laptop computer in an MIT wiring closet in order to download gigabytes of data from their internal network. Certainly there are greater injustices in the world than the trial he was about to face. Perhaps it is because Swartz reminds me so much of myself -- a sense of "there, but for the grace of God, go I" -- but I don't think that's it. I think his case crystallizes for me how deeply entrenched the two-tier "justice" system is in the United States -- and how brutal the lower tier is. His case was certainly an example of prosecutorial overkill, demanding felony charges and 30 years imprisonment for what amounts to a violation of terms of service: ...some legal experts considered the case unfounded, saying that MIT allows guests access to the articles and Swartz, a fellow at Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics, was a guest. As a guest at MIT, Swartz had full legal access to the campus network. And I understand that MIT's agreement with academic publisher JSTOR allows MIT users unlimited access to academic papers published on their website. Had Swartz stayed at home and downloaded a few thousand academic papers, he would have been perfectly within his rights. But by taking his laptop to MIT, plugging it directly into their high-speed network, and leaving it there for a day to download nearly 5 million academic papers, he -- in MIT's opinion -- exceeded his privileges...and deserved criminal charges. Mix in one federal prosecutor with a "serious hate-on" for Swartz (as Cory Doctorow memorably put it), and you have a 26-year-old genius being threatened with 30 years in prison and a lifetime felony record. All this for "stealing" data which (a) was rightfully his to access, (b) was returned by him with no harm done, and (c) was nearly all publicly funded and therefore, theoretically, in the public domain. Contrast this with Jon Corzine, who "lost", with no explanation, $1.6 billion of MF Global customers' money -- real money taken from real people -- and whom federal prosecutors declined to charge with anything. In the aftermath, I'm reading plenty of rallying cries that the time is now to reform the American "justice" system. And yes, truly, that is where the problem lies. Overly expansive law, criminalizing a civil contract violation. Overly aggressive prosecutors, who use the law as a bludgeon to get a plea bargain, sparing them the necessity to prove their case. Too much "law and order" mentality, demanding harsher and harsher sentences for smaller and smaller crimes. And the two-tier justice system, by which the rich and well-connected get off scot-free, and the rest of us must bankrupt ourselves defending from the tax-funded prosecutor, or be thrown in jail. Yes, that system needs to be overhauled or exterminated, root and branch. But I'm sorry to inform everyone: that's never going to happen. Nothing short of a second American revolution will blast the powerful and the elite from their privileged positions, and the dependent and oblivious public will never revolt. Calls for reform are a waste of breath. So what to do? I'd suggest a boycott of MIT, whose behavior in this entire affair has been starkly reprehensible -- they could have dropped charges but did not. (By contrast, JSTOR reportedly did drop that demand once the documents had been returned.) I hope MIT will suffer a stain on its reputation that will take decades of hard work to eradicate. But, unless you are of college age, and shopping around for a university, how do you withdraw your business? (Needless to say, if you are considering MIT, I strongly encourage you to go anywhere else. Especially if you're studying computer science, because you'll never know when MIT will choose to prosecute you for connecting to their network.**) No, I've concluded that there is only one place where meaningful change can actually be accomplished: it's time to put an end to the academic publishing industry. I don't mean an end to publishing -- just an end to the industry which has grown around academia, taking their money from both sides (authors and readers) and demanding outrageous privileges and protections.* An end to the JSTORs of the world, and their never-ending quest to lock down freely contributed (and tax-paid!) content. Unlike other objectives, I think this one is achievable. First, academia is moving in this direction anyway -- more and more authors are grumbling about excessive page charges and glacial publishing schedules, and looking for an alternative. Second, the Internet means that viable "e-publishing" alternatives are starting to exist -- such as the (now) well known arXiv. Third, I can't think of a more fitting tribute to Aaron Swartz, who was persecuted for attempting to liberate academic content from behind paywalls. Now is the time. I'm not saying that this will be easy. Academics operate on a "publish or perish" system whereby their promotions and tenure depend upon their publications. Right now, certain journals are more prestigious than others and confer more credit, thus those journals can charge more for publication and are more likely to appear in the campus library. The bias has to change in favor of "open access" journals. This means university and department administrators have to start giving more credit to on-line instead of print publications. And authors have to start making on-line publication their first, rather than last, choice. It would help if some high-profile authors would make a public commitment to publishing exclusively on-line, but that may not happen. Still, tenured academics could make such a commitment...and it would be a powerful statement. Now, I doubt that 99% of academics know who Aaron Swartz is, or care. I don't think that's necessary; because what I'm proposing is to take a movement which has already started and give it an extra push. And if the 1% who do care add their effort, and change their habits, then the day of free and open academic publishing will come that much sooner. Update: It begins: researchers are posting thousands of articles publicly in tribute to Aaron Swartz. __________ * Many years ago, I completely stopped writing for ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) publications, because they began demanding that authors assign all copyrights to them, preventing authors such as me from posting their own work on their own web pages. Mind you, I was never paid for my articles -- and even if I had been, the demand would still be outrageous. ** In my first year of graduate school, I found a backdoor into a campus computer and promptly made myself an administrator, locking the real administrator out for a day. Back then, that made me a prankster. Today, that would make me a felon...at least at MIT. | |
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