[OPLIN 4cast] OPLIN 4Cast #317: Deadly information

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OPLIN 4Cast

OPLIN 4Cast #317: Deadly information
January 16th, 2013

Aaron Swartz' suicide last week was connected in unfortunate ways to the 
library world. He was being prosecuted by the United States Attorney's 
Office for the District of Massachusetts for putting a computer in a 
wiring closet in a library at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
and setting it up to automatically download scholarly articles from the 
library's JSTOR subscription database. After Mr. Swartz was charged with 
a crime, JSTOR declined to press their own charges and wrote over the 
weekend that, "The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being 
drawn into from the outset, since JSTOR's mission is to foster 
widespread access to the world's body of scholarly knowledge." But 
federal prosecutors persisted, charging Mr. Swartz with felonies under 
the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act which could have resulted in up to 35 
years in prison.

OPLIN is an agency of the state government of Ohio, and as such, we have 
often experienced government policies and procedures that overlook 
common sense and doggedly enforce the letter of the law at the expense 
of the spirit of the law. Such narrow-minded bureaucracy often crushes 
innovation. Sometimes it crushes innovative people. When applied to laws 
that seek to limit access to information on the Internet, it also has 
the potential to crush the very idea that is the foundation of the 
public library: that information should be freely shared with the public.

  * A data crusader, a defendant and now, a cause
    <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/technology/aaron-swartz-a-data-crusader-and-now-a-cause.html>
    (New York Times/Noam Cohen) "The belief that information is power
    and should be shared freely - which Mr. Swartz described in a
    treatise
    <http://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt>
    in 2008 - is under considerable legal assault. The immediate
    reaction among those sympathetic to Mr. Swartz has been anger and a
    vow to soldier on. Young people interviewed on Sunday spoke of the
    government's power to intimidate."
  * Prosecutor as bully
    <http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully>
    (Lessig Blog, v2/Lawrence Lessig) "From the beginning, the
    government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did
    in the most extreme and absurd way. The 'property' Aaron had
    'stolen,' we were told, was worth 'millions of dollars' - with the
    hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit
    from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made
    in a stash of /ACADEMIC ARTICLES/ is either an idiot or a liar. It
    was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as
    if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed."
  * Aaron Swartz, American hero
    <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/12/aaron-swartz-american-hero/>
    (Washington Post Wonkblog/Tim Lee) "Swartz took an aggressive,
    perhaps even reckless, course in his promotion of public access to
    information. The federal courts lock public documents behind a
    paywall on a Web site called PACER. When the judiciary announced a
    pilot program to provide free PACER access to users at certain
    public libraries, Swartz saw an opportunity. Using credentials from
    one of the libraries, he used an automated program to rapidly
    "scrape" documents from the PACER site. He got more than 2 million
    before the courts noticed what was happening and shut down the
    libraries program."
  * RIP, Aaron Swartz
    <http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html> (Boing
    Boing/Cory Doctorow) "He also founded a group called DemandProgress
    <http://demandprogress.org/>, which used his technological savvy,
    money and passion to leverage victories in huge public policy
    fights. DemandProgress's work was one of the decisive factors in
    last year's victory over SOPA/PIPA, and that was only the start of
    his ambition."

*/Tribute fact:/*

A Twitter campaign under the hashtag #pdftribute 
<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414241,00.asp> had as many as 500 
tweets per hour over the weekend, as Twitter users posted links to PDFs 
of scholarly articles in tribute to Mr. Swartz.
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