In case you dont know, Co-founder of Reddit, Creator of RSS 1 Specification, Co-creator of Creative Commons, Aaron Swartz was being prosecuted in United States since 2011, for hacking into the computers of MIT – a university which funds most of its research by public funds, and acquiring academic research papers from JSTOR service with the intent to distribute them to, well, the public who were actually funding them.
Despite the fact that most of the research is funded by public money but held privately and sold to private companies without any reimbursement to the actual public who have paid for them, and that JSTOR dropped the case against Swartz and told the U.S. Government to do the same, U.S. Department of Justice kept prosecuting Swartz under the heroic and unrelenting sacrifices of prosecutor Carmen Ortiz .
Department was charging Swartz with 50 years of jail, which would probably boil down to 20-30 years of jail time if the case concluded, in addition to forcing him to accept that he was a felon. In a climate in which financiers who have crashed entire world economy go without even being charged, leave aside being labeled a felon, and the worst rapists and serial killers get 10-15 years in jail, this act was criticized widely. Yet, this did not prevent the prosecutor from pursuing the case relentlessly. All the while basing the prosecution on interpreting a website’s terms of use as ‘hacking’.
Long story short, a while ago Swartz’s defense fund ran out, and he was penniless, unable to defend himself in court. Which, coupled by the fact that he was not able to accept the label of a felon, apparently caused Aaron to commit suicide, ending his life and depriving the society of a gifted individual, as opposed to the prosecutor who was prosecuting him. As of this day, internet is deprived of a gifted individual who co-authored RSS standard, Creative Commons, liberated public records, built a free public library, worked for Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, Demand Progress and many other contributions – while the massachusetts prosecutor from united states who have pushed this talent to departure lives on. We thank Carmen Ortiz for her relentless pursuit of corporate justice on behalf of influential corporations, against people.
RIP, Aaron Swartz.
You can get more details on this tragedy at Lawrence Lessig’s blog.
