User:Brenty1/sandbox

This post refers to the content of the film. See The Internet's Own Boy for original wikipedia article.

Interviewees in the Film

Cindy Cohn -David Sirota -David Segal -Taren Steinbrickner-kauffman -Ben Wikler -Elliot Peters -Trevor Timm -Cory Doctrow -Noah Swartz -Bob Swartz -Susan Swartz -Benjamin Swartz -Peter Eckersley -Tim Berners-Lee -Lawrence Lessig -Quinn Norton -Brewster Kahle -Stephen Shultze -Carl Malamud -Tim O’Reilly -Matt Stoller -Rep. Zoe LofGren -Alec Resnick -Christopher Soghoian -Sen. Ron Wyden -Orin Kerr -Bryan Stevenson

Premise of the Movie

In the beginning of the movie, the words by Henry David Thoreau appear: “Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once”? These words sum up the political motivations of the late Aaron Swartz.

Background of Aaron Swartz

Younger brother Benjamin Swartz notes that Aaron was: “unexcited about businesses and making money”. At 12 years old, Aaron developed a website called Info Base (theinfo.org) from the comfort of his room – a website that was similar to Wikipedia in nature. His site won a school competition hosted by ArsDigita. This website no longer exists, but he mentions it in his blog (See http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/theinfo). At 14 years old, Swartz became a member of the committee that drafted RSS. According to Peter Eckersley; “[Aaron] worked on laying the foundation for modern hypertext. The RSS part was a tool used to get summaries from other websites”. Aaron describes himself as “frustrated” with school because he thought teachers didn’t know what they were talking about, and that the whole school experience was a hoax. He felt that he could learn by himself objectively instead of learning from teachers’ opinions on the facts. His skepticism about the education process led him to research about the history of education and how the schooling system was developed. This led Swartz down the path of questioning and challenging the status quo.

Activist Career

The emergence of the Internet sparked problems with the pre-existing copy right system. According to Peter Eckersley “Aaron’s generation experienced the collision between an antique copyright system and the internet”. Examples of this are found in Napster and Limewire – peer to peer file sharing violated the existing copy right laws. Aaron then met Lawrence Lessig who at the time challenged copy right law at the Supreme Court level. Together the pair founded the Creative Commons – a website where users can submit pieces of work which could then be used by others. The film notes that the Creative Commons is an integral part of the Flickr web experience. Following this, Aaron moved to a firm called Y Combinator where he created the website infogami. It was not successful, so he merges it with another website that was struggling to form what is now known as Reddit. The founders of Reddit later sold the company. He then started a website called openlibrary.net. The goal was for the website to contain every book ever written and summarize each book in one page. The idea was that vast amounts of knowledge is hard to find and access in physical libraries; so this digital library would bring to the fore front all that has been lost and make all that exists easier to access. According to Swartz, “Books are our cultural legacy, where people go to write things down. To have that swallowed up by one corporation is kind of scary”.

PACER

A question posed in the film by Brewster Kahle is “How do you bring public access to the public domain?” This does not always happen he asserts. “The public domain should be free to all, but its often locked up…One of the things Aaron was interested in was bringing public access to the public domain. It was one of the things that got him into so much trouble”. PACER is a government website that hosts public records at 10 cents per article. Aaron developed a program with the help of Stephen Shultze that Swartz used to download 2.7 million documents from the PACER site. This action caught the attention of US Courts and the FBI, but the FBI closed their investigations.

JSTOR

The narrator in the film describes journal articles as “essentially the entire wealth of human knowledge online, and many have been paid for by tax payer money or government grants. Aaron knew MIT had access to JSTOR and seized the opportunity to make these journal articles free for everyone’s use. On September 25th 2010, Aaron’s Acer laptop begins downloading directly from MIT’s network. The number of articles downloaded are approximately 4-5 million. Authorities were aware of the activity but did not remove the laptop. Instead they installed a camera which caught Aaron in the act.

SOPA

In 2011 Congress sought to pass the SOPA act. In response Aaron cofounded Demand Progress to protest the decision. The global outcry of protestors ended in the disbanding of the SOPA act.

Aaron is arrested

The FBI and the Secret Service became involved. After September 11, 2001, President George Bush signed the Patriot Act to form an Electronic Crimes Task Force to fight “modern terrorists”. Aaron is offered a deal: 3 months in prison, time in a halfway house, and a year of home detention without access to a computer. This was all under the condition that Aaron plead guilty to a felony. Many of Aaron’s family and the interviewees of this film believe that he had not committed anything felony worthy. Even with evidence of Aaron’s activities, the government needed to know what Aaron’s motivations were; what he planned to do with the documents. Quinn Norton, Aaron’s then girlfriend was offered a Queen for a Day Letter or a proffer which allowed prosecutors to ask about Aaron’s case, while Norton was afforded immunity from prosecution. Norton mentions that Aaron had written a Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto. This provided the motivation that the FBI were looking for. On July 14 2011 Aaron was indicted under 4 felony charges and arrested. He was released on $100,000 bail.

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

On September 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against Aaron in violation of the computer fraud and abuse act. Now instead of 4 felony charges he faced 13. The act contributed to 11 of the 13 charges against Aaron. Aaron rejects the plea deal.

Suicide

Aaron commits suicide on Jan 11, 2013.