The Boy Who Could Change the World (2 page)

FREE CULTURE

A
aron Swartz's life was shaped by an ethical belief that information should be shared freely and openly. Driven by this principle, Aaron worked extensively as a leader in the “free culture” movement, which is where we met him and worked closely with him for nearly a decade. From his earliest writings, included at the beginning of this section, Aaron was transfixed by the fact that a piece of knowledge, unlike a piece of physical property, can be shared by large groups of people without making anybody poorer. For Aaron, the clear implication of this fact was that it was unethical to deprive people of information by creating artificial scarcity in knowledge, culture, or information.

His early writing highlights the diversity of ways in which Aaron approached free culture advocacy. In some situations, he tried to work creatively within the system to reform copyright laws that limited free sharing. For example, Aaron's early writing about compulsory license schemes and his work with Creative Commons reflect attempts to address the injustice caused by “unfree” culture. We met Aaron through the 2003 Supreme Court oral argument in
Eldred v. Ashcroft
. At the time, Aaron was outraged that Congress had given in to industry pressures to make copyright last even longer, and he was thrilled to meet other activists working to limit copyright. With the loss in the Eldred case and other legal changes that increased the scope and power of copyright, Aaron was frustrated by the lack of progress in the free culture movement and increasingly adopted a more transgressive approach.

For example, in 2009 Aaron helped lead a project to download and publish public records about court cases that the federal courts charged substantial sums to access through the PACER system. This project spurred a criminal investigation, although he was never charged in the matter. The government's criminal case against him in the last two years of his life charged that Aaron had similarly
downloaded a large number of academic journal articles with the aim of making these articles widely available to the public, regardless of whether they could afford to pay for access. In making its case about Aaron's motives, the government relied on Aaron's long history of writing about issues of free culture and open access and showed a particular interest in “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” published in this section, which called for the liberation of academic knowledge that was locked up by commercial publishers.

In other work, Aaron's commitment to free culture led him to build and design systems to allow its collaborative production. In particular, he was inspired by the free software movement and its demonstration that commitment to an ethic of information sharing could, in practice, open the door to widespread collaboration with enormously valuable results, such as the GNU/Linux operating system and Wikipedia. In fact, Aaron created his own early predecessor to Wikipedia, called The Info Network, and wrote several essays describing other ideas for mass collaboration around other types of free cultural artifacts. Aaron's start-up Infogami—which merged with Reddit in 2005—was another such platform for collaboration and information sharing. After Aaron's own collaborative encyclopedia failed to gain traction, he became an early and active participant in Wikipedia. This section includes a series of essays that Aaron wrote in 2006 as part of his campaign to be elected a director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia.

Aaron was committed to free culture in part because he believed that freely shareable knowledge could transform society for the better. In his earlier writings, he expressed a sense that the mere availability of factual data could be empowering. In 2008, Aaron founded
Watchdog.net
, an organization that attempted to promote increased government transparency by making government data more widely available. Over time, however, Aaron became skeptical of the power of mere transparency, and he began highlighting the need for activism and journalism. This led to his later focus on politics.

Toward the end of his life, Aaron tried to explicitly distance himself from free culture in order to focus on broader issues of in
justice, arguing that copyright issues were merely symptomatic of larger problems of power and corruption and could not usefully be dealt with without addressing these larger political problems. Even in these efforts, however, Aaron repeatedly returned to free culture activism. In the speech that closes this section, Aaron describes being called back into the world of free culture to lead the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a proposed U.S. law designed to restrict the Internet in ways that would cut back on the kind of information sharing that Aaron supported. He calls on his listeners to believe that their personal engagement in activism for information freedom is urgently needed and that they can become the “hero of their own story.”

—Benjamin Mako Hill and Seth Schoen

Counterpoint: Downloading Isn't Stealing

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001112

January 8, 2004

Age 17

The
New York Times
Upfront
asked me to contribute a short piece to a point/counterpoint they were having on downloading. (I would defend downloading, of course.) I thought I managed to write a pretty good piece, especially for its size and audience, in a couple days. But then I found out my piece was cut because the
Times
had decided not to tell kids to break the law. So, from the graveyard, here it is.

Stealing is wrong. But downloading isn't stealing. If I shoplift an album from my local record store, no one else can buy it. But when I download a song, no one loses it and another person gets it. There's no ethical problem.

Music companies blame a fifteen percent drop in sales since 2000 on downloading.
^*
*
But over the same period, there was a recession, a price hike, a 25% cut in new releases,
^†
†
and a lack of popular new artists. Factoring all that in, maybe downloading
increases
sales. And
90% of the catalog of the major labels isn't for sale anymore.
^*
*
The Internet is the only way to hear this music.

Even if downloading did hurt sales, that doesn't make it unethical. Libraries and video stores (neither of which pay per rental) hurt sales too. Is it unethical to use them?

Downloading may be illegal. But 60 million people used Napster
^†
†
and only 50 million voted for Bush or Gore.
^{‡
‡}
We live in a democracy. If the people want to share files then the law should be changed to let them.

And there's a fair way to change it. A Harvard professor found that a $60/yr. charge for broadband users would make up for all lost revenues.
^§
§
The government would give it to the affected artists and, in return, make downloading legal, sparking easier-to-use systems and more shared music. The artists get more money and you get more music. What's unethical about that?

UTI Interview with Aaron Swartz

https://archive.org/download/AaronSwartz20040123UTIInterview/Aaron-Swartz-2004-01-23-UTI-interview.html

January 23, 2004

Age 17

Hey. Who are you?

Well, I'm trying to figure that out myself, actually. Broadly, though, I'm a teenage kid who's interested in improving the world (mostly through law, politics, and technology).

This year, I'm going to try to update my
weblog
daily with interesting thoughts, program some interesting new website software, and work on some website projects that help people better understand what's going on in American politics.

I'm also going to try and learn more about reverse engineering, an important process that there seems to be little published information about, probably because laws like the DMCA are making more and more of it illegal (although the law itself is likely unconstitutional, the threat of losing your house or going to jail is enough to scare away most people).

In previous years, I've worked on the RSS specification for syndicating websites, the RDF specification for sharing databases, and the Creative Commons specification for describing copyright licenses.

From my experience, political discussions on the net almost never convince anyone to switch sides or rethink their position. Do you push your views to change anyone else's or simply to state your view in it?

Well, I'm an optimist about that. I think that most people, when
faced with overwhelming facts, will come around. (I know I certainly have.) But it is definitely difficult to overcome people's entrenched beliefs, so I feel that if I only convince people that the other side is a reasonable position to take, even if they themselves don't take it, then I've been a success.

It is sort of a quixotic task in that sense, but it's also useful to me by helping clarify my ideas.

When you say something particularly controversial on the web, you'll get all sorts of people coming at you with arguments. Considering those arguments and seeing if they're right or, if they're wrong, why they're wrong, has been very valuable in clarifying my beliefs (and similarly, I hope my challenges have helped other people clarify
their
beliefs).

Lately, there's been a bit of discussion on piracy, where you once chimed in saying that Nick Bradbury doesn't have any innate right to have people pay for his software. Shouldn't deciding whether you want people to pay for your software be up to the developers? And isn't it a crime to download stuff that should be paid for according to a contract (the user terms) bound to the product itself, even if it “physically” isn't stealing?

Let's take those in reverse order.

First, copyright law is the law, I'm not arguing about that.

Second, whether shrinkwrap or clickthrough contracts that come with products are actually enforceable is still undecided by the courts. Personally, I think enforcing them would be a very bad idea because no one reads those licenses and they put all sorts of absurd things in there.

For example, you have a right
guaranteed
by U.S. copyright law to make a backup copy of software in case the original copy goes bad for some reason. It would be very unfair if they could take those rights away.

When you're forced to follow laws passed by a government of the people, that's one thing, but when you have to follow all sorts of additional restrictions added by some unaccountable corporation, it's quite a different situation. What if they make you promise not to say
anything negative about their software, as Google almost tried to do? What if they ask for your firstborn son? No one will actually know they agreed to these provisions, because they didn't read them—they just wanted to use the software they spent their own money to purchase—but they'll be held accountable for violating them.

So, that's still a matter of controversy, but this isn't so unreasonable. Even mainstream organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the oldest association of computing professionals, is against this idea.

Third, as a matter of practice, I think people should pay for software when they can and should donate money to the authors of things they enjoy even when they're not asked to.

If you get these things over the Internet, it's much easier for you to do that, since you don't have to pay all the middlemen—warehouses, distributors, stores, publishers—this large infrastructure that's been built up because of the physical nature of these goods. You may buy a computer book for $50 but the author will be lucky if they see $5 from that. So if you download the book from the author's website and send him $10, then both you and the author will be better off.

However (and this apparently is the controversial part), I agree with Thomas Jefferson: the government has no
duty
to make sure authors get paid.

And even more importantly, I think the government shouldn't be giving authors control over how we express ourselves. The International Olympic Committee should not be able to stop groups from calling themselves the
“Gay Olympics,”
Mattel should not be able to stop people from singing about
“Barbie Girl”
or taking pictures of
“Food Chain Barbie,”
and Dr. Seuss shouldn't be able to
stop people who write in his style
.

So we need to be careful in understanding that whenever we expand these intellectual monopoly laws, we inevitably take away people's rights to express themselves.

Even if verbatim copying is illegal, then conceivably you could be sued for quoting Martin Luther King.

There are a range of solutions—some more dramatic, some less. But we cannot discuss any solutions if people continue to insist that
authors have an innate all-encompassing moral right to control their works forever. If people believe that, then even the most reasonable of solutions will be decried as theft.

All EULAs aside, there must be something somewhere in the law defining what is a ware and can be bought, and also what is considered “stealing” for this. If a software product qualifies as a ware, shouldn't “stealing” according to this law be applicable to the software too?

The law about what is stealing is very clear. Stealing is taking something away from someone so they cannot use it. There's no way that making a copy of something is stealing under that definition.

If you make a copy of something, you'll be prosecuted for copyright infringement or something similar—not larceny (the legal term for stealing). Stealing, like piracy and intellectual property, is another one of those terms cooked up to make us think of intellectual works the same way we think of physical items. But the two are very different.

You can't just punish people because they took away a “potential sale.” Earthquakes take away potential sales, as do libraries and rental stores and negative reviews. Competitors also take away potential sales. One reason people might be buying less CDs is because they're spending their money on DVDs. Or, as Philip Greenspun has argued, they're spending their time on cell phones.

I mean, talking to your girlfriend can often be more enjoyable than listening to music, but I don't think we need to start suing girlfriends.

So the question then becomes what's a reasonable form of taking away sales, and what's an unreasonable one. And that's a tough question, but I think we need to evaluate it by looking at what's best for society. Some people say that getting people to stop copying, whether through threats of lawsuits or technological restraints, is the only way to get people to keep coming up with interesting things.

First, I don't think this is true. Look at weblogs, Homestar Runner, Red vs. Blue, Nothing So Strange, Scott McCloud, etc., etc. There's essentially nothing to stop anyone from copying any of these, yet the authors are all making a good living off their work.

Second, if it is true, I think we're in real trouble, because as a simple matter of technology, it's going to be increasingly difficult to get people to stop copying. We can almost always get around the technical measures and we can find technical ways around most of the social ones. So if we choose this option of stricter and stricter enforcement, we're heading down a very dark path where law enforcement gets more and more heavy-handed and authoritarian, and copying goes farther and farther underground.

At the end of that road, I think copying is going to win out, but either way, the collateral damage to our civil liberties, our computers, and our children is going to be tremendous.

What method would you prefer more for paying creative minds? Optional donations, micropayments, some sort of flat-rate tax/fee that would go to some sort of association which would distribute it accordingly, or something completely different?

Well, compared to that dark path, I'd prefer all of them. :-)

However, I think that easy small donations, perhaps optional, are probably the way to go, along with making money off of ancillary things like T-shirts and CDs and DVDs. For example, Homestar Runner doesn't charge or ask for donations but they've been incredibly successful through selling merchandise. Wikipedia's raised an incredible amount of money, probably $50,000 altogether, simply from donations. So I think we should try all these ways, but I'm optimistic that if you provide something people really like, and you make it easy for them to pay you for it, that you'll do fine.

But if it turns out that doesn't work, I've also been looking into a system called
Compulsory Licensing
.

The idea is that you pay about $5 more a month on your cable modem bill in exchange for being able to download all the music and movies you want. Then you anonymously submit what you downloaded and the money gets sent to the people who made it. The submission is done all automatically by your computer, so you don't have to do anything.

Now there are a lot of problems with this idea, and there are lots of objections you can come up with to it (privacy! security!), but I
think if we solve all of them, we may have a viable system that is a win for everyone. Authors get paid and users save money and get easier access to what they want.

Some people don't take you seriously because you're a lot younger than them. What do you think causes this?

I think there are several reasons. First, people generalize: “Well, most kids I've met are pretty dumb, this guy's a kid, so he's probably pretty dumb too.”

Second, one of the (I think, valuable) things about kids is that they don't really know a lot of
what you can't say
. So when kids say perfectly reasonable things that you're not really supposed to say, they just write it off as “Kids say the darnedest things!” and “He just doesn't know better.”

Third, and I should be clear I'm just speculating here, there might be some sort of embarrassment factor.

But one of the great things about the Internet is how it's helped me overcome a lot of these things—first, because your age isn't immediately obvious every time you speak (as it is when someone looks at you), and second, because geeks seem a lot more willing to treat people based on what they can do rather than who they are.

This isn't unique to kids, of course. The Internet has an amazingly liberating aspect for everyone from blacks to the blind. So perhaps that's one reason why I'm especially concerned about draconian proposals for an “Internet Driver's License” or a crackdown on anonymity. Quite aside from the impracticality and ineffectiveness of these proposals, they could have the effect of tagging who people are, and reintroducing those indicators that the Internet has removed.

You've put a tremendous amount of work in, for example, RDF and RSS 1.0 (the latter using the former). People say this is the basis of the “Semantic Web.” Could you cue us in on what they hope to achieve with this, how they will make everyone start doing something to achieve it, and what exactly it is we'll start doing? Do you believe this is possible?

So, uh, here's the plan:

            
1.
  
Collect data

            
2.
  
???????

            
3.
  
PROFIT!!!

Uh, more specifically, the idea is to get everyone sharing their vast databases of information in RDF with each other. Then we can write programs that put this data together to answer questions and take actions to make our lives easier.

The example I always give is a smarter Google. Instead of just being able to ask “What web pages contain these words?” you can ask all sorts of real questions: “What bands that my friends like are playing around here in the next week?” It can then look at who your stated friends are, see what bands they claim to like, get their schedules, find where you are, and see if any of them match, assuming all this data is available in RDF.