Aaron Swartz: intellectual theif or revolutionary thinker?

An open exchange of ideas. This is the idea that brought about Aaron Swartz’ fame as well as his death.

Swartz has been called a technological prodigy. And rightfully so. He began turning heads at around the age of 14 when he began consulting senior technologists. A year before that, he had already conceptualized the idea of Wikipedia, according to CNN.


His other contributions to the internet include: “Creative Commons (an organization that releases licenses so authors can let their work be more easily reused), Open Library (a public library of online works), Reddit (an immensely popular open discussion forum), Markdown (a simple way to write Web pages), web.py (making it easier for developers to create Web applications), Jottit.com (type-and-post website) and much more,” wrote CNN author David Weinberger (http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/15/opinion/weinberger-aaron-swartz/?hpt=hp_bn7).

Many of his contribution fed an audience starving for their voices to be heard over the internet. He helped develop a platform of expression for the masses.

Was he the Robin Hood of the internet information? Did he take from the well-educated at MIT to educate those who are less-educated? Was he giving back something that rightfully belonged to others?

A group known as Anonymous hacked MIT’snetwork on January sixteenth and left this message on it’s pages:

"Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government's prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for — freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it — enabling the collective betterment of the world through the facilitation of sharing — an ideal that we should all support (http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N62/anonymous.html)."

I think Anonymous said it well. While I do believe stealing is wrong, I’m not convinced that what Swartz did could be called stealing.

If I am paying for something, should I not be able to access it? If something is publicly-funded, shouldn’t the public have access to it?

I think there is a big debate to be had over Swartz’ final contribution to social media. Where to we draw the line between intellectual property and information for all?