Fragile Young Genius Crushed - RIP Aaron Schwartz

[syrakusos]

MM: “Stephen, I can get your JARS article, stand in the street and read it out loud while my listeners memorize the words. What are you going to do?”

Way gross. I’ll depend on the market to quash that.

But suppose every time JARS published an issue, someone copied it and posted it on the web where it is open to any readers for free? Meanwhile JARS is trying to sell their hardcopy and their electronic versions. I expect with copyright they have an effective remedy in law.

Stephen, I agree 100%. I earn money from the sale of copyrighted materials. And I have been ripped off. And plagiarized. So, I get that part of intellectual property rights. But even Ayn Rand explained that the reason why copyright applies to the form but not the content is that you cannot prevent someone from knowing what they know. Once the words are out they are seeds on the wind, thus we disseminate knowledge. ... and yes, you can own, lease, and sell seeds....

My favorite Tolkein characters are the Ents. We need to take our time and talk things out.

[Guyau]

.

"The Criminal Charges against Aaron Schwartz"

by Orin Kerr Part 1, The Law

Investigation Ordered by MIT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS

I misspelled the last name, which should have been Swartz.

[BaalChatzaf]

.

"The Criminal Charges against Aaron Schwartz"

by Orin Kerr Part 1, The Law

Investigation Ordered by MIT

Am I being naive. It sounds like the authorities had Schwarz dead to rights. He was defrauding, impersonating and filching.

Don't get me wrong. I like it when science articles are available for free or at low cost. It means many can access them, not just those with academic connections (which cost a lot of money to acquire)..

Again, am I wrong for thinking it is a Good Thing to make Schwarts a "hero" like Robin Hood?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[BaalChatzaf]

.

"The Criminal Charges against Aaron Schwartz"

by Orin Kerr Part 1, The Law

Investigation Ordered by MIT

Am I being naive. It sounds like the authorities had Schwarz dead to rights. He was defrauding, impersonating and filching. The law is the law. If the law be foolish or unjust then let it be repealed by constitutional means. If Schwartz were doing civil disobedience, then he must or should have expected the full legal response to his honorably illegal act. That is one of the rules of civil disobedience. The disobeyer must expect and accept to full legal response of a law he considers unjust to be applied fully to him.

Don't get me wrong. I like it when science articles are available for free or at low cost. It means many can access them (Including myself), not just those with academic connections or corporate connections (which cost a lot of money to acquire)..

Again, am I wrong for thinking it is not a Good Thing to make Schwarts a "hero" like Robin Hood?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Reidy]

Off-topic historical note concerning #21: Branden did not invent sentence-completion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_completion_tests

[Brant Gaede]

Off-topic historical note concerning #21: Branden did not invent sentence-completion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_completion_tests

And who said he did?

--Brant

[Guyau]

Roger, I was a little puzzled by your remarks in #24 of "very little has happened" by free downloads of your compositions. Did you mean very little of a negative nature has happened? If you meant of a positive nature, I would suggest that feedback is only one sort of positive result. There is also the fact, a positive one, that your creations are read. The main point of all this is for one mind to communicate with another by these texts.

A nice help for deciding whether one's investment in compositions---beyond the criterion of its enlargement of your own understanding---is worthwhile is knowing how much your work is being read. These posting sites that display the number of reads are helpful in that way. And your own site in which you can get reports on visits, I imagine, would also be a good thing.

Only connect. --E. M. Forster

Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights that they had achieved, were the friends that could not be lost. --A. Einstein

My books are filled with friends across centuries, and so are essays online filled with friends, purchased or free.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

It sounds like the authorities had Schwarz dead to rights. He was defrauding, impersonating and filching.

Bob,

Some would see it like dressing up as an Indian, boarding a ship in the middle of the night and throwing a crapload of tea overboard into the harbor.

Except without the destruction.

I'm not saying I see it this way. But I am saying that I can see how he would see it this way.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

It sounds like the authorities had Schwarz dead to rights. He was defrauding, impersonating and filching.

Bob,

Some would see it like dressing up as an Indian, boarding a ship in the middle of the night and throwing a crapload of tea overboard into the harbor.

Except without the destruction.

I'm not saying I see it this way. But I am saying that I can see how he would see it this way.

Michael

The Boston Tea Party -was- illegal (under Crown Law) and it was an act of treason. The subsequent revolution (being successful) nullified the breach of law, but a breach of law, did IN FACT take place. The American Revolution was Treason simpliciter. Only winning could nullify the penalties.

It is Treason to try to overthrow the King. If one succeed, then it is, factually, alright.

Sometimes illegal initiation of force has its uses.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Roger Bissell]

Roger, I was a little puzzled by your remarks in #24 of "very little has happened" by free downloads of your compositions. Did you mean very little of a negative nature has happened? If you meant of a positive nature, I would suggest that feedback is only one sort of positive result. There is also the fact, a positive one, that your creations are read. The main point of all this is for one mind to communicate with another by these texts.

A nice help for deciding whether one's investment in compositions---beyond the criterion of its enlargement of your own understanding---is worthwhile is knowing how much your work is being read. These posting sites that display the number of reads are helpful in that way. And your own site in which you can get reports on visits, I imagine, would also be a good thing.

Only connect. --E. M. Forster

Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights that they had achieved, were the friends that could not be lost. --A. Einstein

My books are filled with friends across centuries, and so are essays online filled with friends, purchased or free.

Stephen, I realize that there often are delayed or obscured effects of what we do, and that it may take years or generations for them to clearly manifest (if ever). I'm resigned to that. I do what I do mostly for myself anyway. I come up with an insight, write it up, publish it, and move on -- only revisiting it if someone offers critical feedback, or if it occurs to me that I have something more to say or an error to correct. I really am (primarily) intrinsically motivated.

As I said in my previous post, I have gotten a LOT of helpful feedback here on OL. Both positive and negative. All grist for the mill and much appreciated.

What dismays me is how different things are now than in the "good old days" of the 70s, when some of us would avidly wait for the next Objectivist or Personalist or Individualist or Reason Papers to come out -- to see what cutting-edge arguments bolstering the case for egoism or rights might be offered, or what new attempts to push the envelope of mainstream Objectivism or Libertarianism might be made.

We were much ~less~ connected back then, and yet there was a LOT of interaction between authors and critics. I had numerous letters forwarded to me from Reason magazine as well as phone calls about arguments I made on abortion and anarchism. I used to joke that "I must be doing something right," when I got agitated negative feedback from both sides of a controversy. :-) So, what I'm wondering is: where is that same spirit of leaping into the fray ~now~?

Now, even though we are MUCH better connected than in the old days, and even though my email address accompanies every issue of JARS my essays appear in and is on my personal web site, I get virtually NO communication from people about my JARS or web site essays. Hell, I get 50 emails or more on genealogy for every one I get on philosophy, if that's not an underestimate.

Perhaps the problem is that the JARS material was free. I know more than one person who said they could not affort to subscribe to JARS. Yet, when they were mailed complimentary copies, and when the journal was made free-access online, there was no huzzah of appreciation, let alone feedback to authors of essays in their line(s) of interest. All I'm saying is that people often devalue things that have too small a price (or no price).

It would be nice if I had a counter telling me how many people had read/downloaded my web site essays, but I don't. I might be able to find out from Chris the number of times each of my JARS essays was accessed/downloaded, if that information was ever recorded and is still available. It's worth looking into, so thanks for that suggestion.

As for how we regard people we will never meet, but who influence us or will be influenced by us, it's hard for me to wrap my mind and feelings around calling them "friends." But I certainly think of them as "kindred spirits." I would love to have met John Locke, among others.

In an odd sort of parallel to genealogy, I sometimes feel a deeper kinship to philosophers long-dead than to those working in the field today -- just as I feel a closer bond to relatives who lived in the 1800s than to many of my currently living ones.

Just the other day, I had a first cousin once-removed curse me out on Facebook (using FY and A-hole) for telling him that his strategy of giving to charity without taking the tax deduction did ~not~ make him more noble than the rich people who do take it, because the deduction would allow him to give a larger amount to help others with the same net effect on his finances. He didn't appreciate my telling him so, and was unapologetic, "even though he's kin."

Unfortunately, he has the same first name as one of my sons, so several of my other relatives were dismayed at what might be wrong in my immediate family. Needless to say, they were relieved to find out it was some middle-aged dude from Louisiana, not my 30 year old buddy who still gives me grins and hugs every time we're together. :-)

REB

[Jonathan]

What dismays me is how different things are now than in the "good old days" of the 70s, when some of us would avidly wait for the next Objectivist or Personalist or Individualist or Reason Papers to come out -- to see what cutting-edge arguments bolstering the case for egoism or rights might be offered, or what new attempts to push the envelope of mainstream Objectivism or Libertarianism might be made.

We were much ~less~ connected back then, and yet there was a LOT of interaction between authors and critics. I had numerous letters forwarded to me from Reason magazine as well as phone calls about arguments I made on abortion and anarchism. I used to joke that "I must be doing something right," when I got agitated negative feedback from both sides of a controversy. :-) So, what I'm wondering is: where is that same spirit of leaping into the fray ~now~?

I think it's probably mostly an issue of the advancement of the technology of communication. The world has changed. Intellectual exchanges no longer have to be formally orchestrated. Print is dying, and it's becoming less important for people to jump through the hoops of publication and other old-school methods of presenting, criticizing and defending ideas. There's now less exclusivity, and much less annoying scholarly pomp -- which means that there are new sets of advantages and disadvantages.

J

[Guyau]

Roger, concerning the part Jonathan quoted, and thinking a bit about what Jonathan said, it does seem likely that if those print outlets you mentioned back then had to function alongside the web, a lot of their readership and feedback letters would have fallen off. I expect a big segment of potential readers for such material as they were issuing have virtually all of their reading time consumed and all of their need for discussion or further research satisfied free of charge or wait on the internet. Having shifted the archive of JARS over to the JSTOR arrangement, I'd expect the number of reads the articles receive will be fewer.

I don’t mean to suggest that decline in feedback does not also reflect decline of interest in frontiers of Objectivist or libertarian thought. Perhaps overall interest has fallen.

It has taken a while for this to become known to me, but some readers of my more serious work posted on internet forums have eventually mentioned to me that they had not commented, and presumed others had not commented, on such-and-such piece because it was at their own far reaches of understanding, but please, keep it up. Putting up serious pieces with the Corner oversight at OL has been especially worthwhile and has encouraged enormous productivity from me, given the ability to track the counts. Even outside Corner, with the fair levels of civility at OL and at OO these days, serious material can fly pretty well, at least until it disappears below the surface of the front page (which one can fix a little by links to it in one’s profile page).

I know it is a little like writing serious philosophy which then appears in a newspaper having all sorts of other stuff in it, rather than in a publication having only serious companions. Here are readers, here readers have found me, readers mostly unknown to me (few of my readers post here, the math says), but at least known to exist by the tallies of their visits. True, there is no acknowledgement of what I write here in printed media. I do not return that disfavor; I try to cite all related work within this small subculture, and with Objectivity too, that was the policy, the practice required for all writers. (As you know, I don't always succeed in including every work that would be appropriate, but I have never known anyone else in this subculture to be nearly so encompassing in that regard.) I know that the web sites will disappear, and all one has written with them. We are just for a while, but the day to be had here was worth making.

Printed media competes with this medium for my compositions. In a couple of years I should be in good position of completed threads to give considerable time to writing for hard copy and less time for new composition at these posting sites. This competition is an example of the way there are too many good things in the world.

[Ellen Stuttle]

The Incas didn't invent the wheel much less use it. They must have been low grade morons since they didn't need any geniuses for that.

Off-topic but...

The question "Why did the peoples of the New World fail to invent the wheel?" is one which often comes up in discussions of the history of technology.

Here's an answer from the website "The Straight Dope."

[....] First of all, we note a peculiar pattern here. It wasn't just the Incas who failed to invent the wheel; every other civilization in the New World (with one exception, which we'll get to in a minute) managed to overlook it as well. For that matter, the ancient Americans also had to struggle along without the true arch, the cart, the plow, the potter's wheel, the bellows, glass, iron, and stringed instruments. But it's unfair to attribute this sorry technological record to either lack of IQ or (as far as the wheel was concerned) an infatuation with transport via brute strength. The fact is that most civilizations in the Old World didn't invent the wheel either--instead, they borrowed it from some other culture. The wheel appears to have been first used in Sumer in the Middle East around 3500 BC, whence it spread across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. It didn't arrive in Britain until 500 BC. [....]

But there are other factors involved. The principle of rotary motion, as you point out, is pretty obvious, and was well known throughout the New World as well as the Old. The Incas, for instance, are thought to have used wooden rollers to haul the giant stones they used to build their cities. Unfortunately, the New World suffered from a conspicuous scarcity of draft animals. The only beast of burden known in the Americas was the llama, a delicate critter restricted to certain parts of the Andes, which was used solely as a pack animal. Without draft animals you cannot do extensive hauling with sledges, and without sledges it will never occur to you that the wheel would be a handy thing to have. [....] The Sumerians, on the other hand, had considerable experience with what we might call regularly scheduled sledge service, and even so it took them 2,000 years of fumbling before the idea of the wheel finally dawned. Not that it just popped out of the blue. The general sequence of friction-reducing inventions is thought to have been runners, rollers, rollers held in place by guides, rollers held in place by guides and thickened on the ends to make them roll straighter, the wheel and axle, and from there it's pretty much a straight shot to the Chevy Impala.

But you wanted to know about that exception I mentioned. The wheel evidently was familiar to the ancient Mexicans, the only known instance of its having been invented independently of the Sumerian version. Unfortunately, it apparently never occurred to anyone at the time that wheels had any practical application, and their use was confined to little clay gadgets that are thought to be either toys or cult objects. [....]

.

Some other factors not mentioned in the piece:

Specifically pertaining to the Incas, wheeled vehicles wouldn't have been much use for hauling stuff up steep mountainsides.

The Eastern woodlands tribes used waterways and canoes for transportation. Wheeled vehicles would have needed roadways cut through the forests.

On the Great Plains, where wheeled vehicles would have been handy, there weren't many trees.

Also, what would the AmerIndians have used for felling trees and cutting off slices?

Ellen

[Guyau]

.

Ellen, thank you very much for this information. I had started to make a remark about bearings being more of a problem than the disk and axel, but then sensed I didn't have a big enough picture. You have found the right stuff.

[merjet]

The correct spelling is axle. Axel is a jump in figure skating.

[Brant Gaede]

What happened to all the editing options? I can't control the font or the size of the print or anything to speak of. All I can post in is this outsized bold face. Everytime the software gets upgraded I get downgraded--or so it seems.

--Brant

signing off then back on through AOL got rid of the boldface, but I still have no options but the "Edit" line

now I'm back through Internet Explorer and the boldface is back leaving me with no idea how people are actually reading me

Edited January 15, 2013 by Brant Gaede

[syrakusos]

What happened to all the editing options? ...

now I'm back through Internet Explorer and the boldface is back leaving me with no idea how people are actually reading me

To the right of your avatar is the BBCode icon. If you clicked that accidentally as I do, going for Bold, you shut off the current mode.

(I think.)

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

What happened to all the editing options? ...

now I'm back through Internet Explorer and the boldface is back leaving me with no idea how people are actually reading me

To the right of your avatar is the BBCode icon. If you clicked that accidentally as I do, going for Bold, you shut off the current mode.

(I think.)

Michael and Brant,

This is correct.

Here is a screenshot. It turns the WYSIWYG editor on and off, which includes the formatting buttons.

WYSIWYG = What You See Is What You Get.

The button to the right of the eraser is called "Special BBCode." (It's the second to the right of the one I circled.) I fiddled with it a little, and I suggest you do, too, if you need the resources it provides.

It's not as clear as it could be, so fiddling with it seems to be the only way to learn it.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Now all is back to normal, but I didn't do anything.

--Brant

I had no BBCode icon to click on even--now I do

[Brant Gaede]

The correct spelling is axle. Axel is a jump in figure skating.

The Incas didn't invent that either.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Now the prosecutor bullying I complained about is beginning to see the light of day.

Carmen Ortiz's henchman, Stephen Heymann, has previously hounded another hacker into suicide, a guy named Jonathan James. Heymann also wanted Harvard to set up spying on all intranet users, but Harvard, to its credit, passed on that one.

This dude sounds like a real sweetheart. A regular James Valliant, that one.

In addition to the Wikipedia articles linked in the names of these illustrious nobodies, here are a few news articles.

Carmen Ortiz, U.S. Attorney, Under Fire Over Suicide Of Internet Pioneer Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz's Lawyer: Prosecutor Stephen Heymann Wanted 'Juicy' Case For Publicity

Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners

Wanna bet that the massively growing surge on the Internet is going to be the undoing of Ortiz? And wanna bet that she is going to try to make Heymann take the fall?

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Now it's back to I've got no buttons.

--Brant

but I've got boldface and the "Edit by"

Edited January 16, 2013 by Brant Gaede

[Ellen Stuttle]

Re the invention of the wheel, see this thread started by Michael Marotta for an alternate account of who got there first.

Ellen

[Guyau]

.

Orin Kerr has issued the second part of the paper linked in #27.

The Criminal Charges against Aaron Swartz – Part 2 – Prosecutorial Discretion

[syrakusos]

To provide some attempted answers, I’m going to break down the question into four different issues: First, was any criminal punishment appropriate in the case? Second, if so, how much criminal punishment was appropriate? Third, who is to blame if the punishment was excessive and the government’s tactics were overzealous? And fourth, does the Swartz case show the need to amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and if so, how?

Seems like a foregone conclusion, much as I agree with it. I have been at this for a while...

Me quoted in this book.

My interview with Mitch Kapor on "Civilizing the Electronic Frontier" archived here

My interview with hacker "Knightmare" archived here.

Me on the "Jerusalem B" virus from 1989.

... and yes, I earn income from copyrighted publications, and yes, I have had my intellectual property rights (so-called) violated. ... just to say: It's complicated. And anyone who disagrees that it is complicated is a duckspeaker.