Fragile Young Genius Crushed - RIP Aaron Schwartz

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Fragile Young Genius Crushed - RIP Aaron Schwartz

At 26 years old, Aaron Schwartz hung himself.

Why?

What was there to die for?

He was one of the inventors of the RSS feed (at 14!). Co-founder of Reddit. Internet freedom activist.

This last might explain it.

He already suffered from depression. That's not good for someone who was looking at millions of dollars--which he did not have--in legal fees and possibly going to jail for decades. It was too much and he went over the edge. He hung himself.

The USA government considered Aaron Schwartz a felon and was prosecuting him as such. His crime? He downloaded a crap-load of scientific papers he believed should be free to the public, especially seeing how public funds helped produce almost all of them.

Now Aaron is dead and his persecutor, Carmen M. Ortiz, is alive. Not even JSTOR--the company behind the site he hacked--wanted to prosecute him. But US Attorney Ortiz did. She needed a high-profile win for her career. She needed to put a genius behind bars. She needed to show that smart-aleck who was boss.

Well decades from now, people are still going to know who Aaron Schwartz was, they are still going to be using the wealth he helped produce from his precious mind. But nobody will remember Ortiz. And it won't matter two-hoots that she got appointed by Obama.

Watch the video at the end and give a silent thank you to Aaron Schwartz for getting the anti-SOPA effort off the ground. If that seems remote, think about this. His work ultimately means you are still free to post on OL without government review or permission.

Aaron lived long enough to learn that SOPA usurps freedom, that copyright law contains a seed that can easily grow into government tyranny. So people need to be vigilant in keeping that seed from sprouting. If you view the video, you will see that he did not live long enough to learn that Social Security comes with the same seed. I believe he would have realized it over time.

But no longer.

This is one David who got stomped by Goliath.

It's a sad, sad day...

Reddit co-founder commits suicide

Aaron Swartz, Precocious Programmer and Internet Activist, Dies at 26

http://youtu.be/Fgh2dFngFsg

Michael

[Guyau]

.

Speaking of JSTOR, sadly for some, JARS archive has recently gone to JSTOR, and the old online archive for JARS has been eliminated. I'm OK, as I have every issue since the beginning of JARS hardcopy. But most of you are out in the cold now (unless you are finally willing to shell out and become a subscriber, in which case, you will have access to the archive while you remain a subscriber), and I will no longer be able to link you up with JARS articles that I reference in my writings.

[Reidy]

For various reasons I have a hard time getting worked up over this. One is that Swartz was known to suffer from depression; to say that he killed himself over the pending charges is a psychologically questionable post hoc. Plenty of depressives kill themselves when they aren't under indictment, and plenty of people under indictment don't. Another is that he had already gotten away with it once (in the PACER matter) and would have known that he couldn't count on such luck a second time. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. Finally I don't see what SOPA had to do with his actions or the prosecution's in the JSTOR case.

[jts]

Suicide? Depression? Antidepressants?

antidepressants suicide

[mfgreaves]

It's incredibly sad. I can't imagine his parents' pain right now.

Unfortunately, from what I have read, I cannot conclude that Swartz was a good person; in fact destructively mis-guided; and it is ironic that he was persecuted by an appointee of a President whose policies he seemed to strongly support.

He appears to have had no regard for property or material values, was strongly biased against American corporations and opposed any role for money in politics. His view on economics and government spending seemed to be left-of-Krugman. In fact he seemed like a classic socialist anarchist.

He wanted the Democrats to spend without regard for the debt limit and for Obama to feel no power from the Tea Party or congressional Republicans.

He seemed sympathetic with the Occupy movement, Assange and may have been targeted because his actions were similar to Bradley Manning's.

I can't imagine too many around here would approve of these characteristics.

It's too bad that so many bright, bright kids think that they know better than the whole world that came before them.

And too bad that this one killed himself.

Wish I could be kinder.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Pete,

I haven't been this angry about bureaucrats persecuting geniuses since I learned that Tchaikovsky was ordered to drink cholera water to protect the reputation of an illustrious nobody among the Russian nobility. Tchaikovsky had an affair with his nephew, got caught, and homosexuality in the family would have embarrassed the precious little non-entity.

Does anyone remember the name of that idiot? He certainly was not able to write a musical masterwork. And he deprived the rest of humanity of how many treasures?

Ditto for Ortiz, Can she invent a breath-taking Internet tool like RSS or a massive social networking environment like Reddit?

I grieve the loss of genius, especially those who break the rules. I don't care about their politics or confusions. So long as they create great stuff, I believe insignificant bureaucrats (meaning all bureaucrats) should stay the hell out of their way. And when they stop creating great stuff, the second-hander Grundies on a power trip should still leave them alone out of respect.

Michael

[jts]

At 26 years old, Aaron Schwartz hung himself.

I don't believe it. Police and friends are not good enough evidence.

[Guyau]

.

Michael, this death reminded me of the suicide of Bobbie Arnstein, although in her case the law she had evidently broken was itself not a protection of individual rights, but an infringement of them.

[Reidy]

What you say in #6 is what Rand believed when she wrote The Little Street. Fortunately, she got over it. How long do you think people would keep producing intellectual product some if punk could steal it just to let us know he could get away with it? As long as you're talking about real life in terms of cognitive rather than sense-of-live abstractions, the rules are for the übermenschen, too.

In any event, nobody has convinced me that Swartz's politics or his legal troubles had anything to do with his suicide, and I doubt that anyone alive will ever know.

[Guyau]

Peter, my presumption, unless information to the contrary comes out, would be rather opposite. I would take it more likely the man ended his life on account of his legal situation than on account of depression unconnected to that situation. His life of freedom was foreseeably coming to an end, and he could very well decide to just stop at this point for that reason.

Then too, I would presume he was not being prosecuted because of his mental abilities or achievements, but because he was genuinely thought to have committed a crime.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Pete,

You sound like you know absolutely nothing about Schwartz. He was anything but a "punk." The people whose "property" you claim he was stealing use everday FOR FREE WITHOUT PAYING A CENT the stuff he invented. Hell, most don't even know enough about it to say thank you.

RSS feeds are a big deal. The entire news industry, for just one example, runs on them.

But let's look at that "property" people own, the "private property" that uses Schwartz's open source resources up the giggy.

The first case was the PACER database of US federal court documents. The government uses tax money to build and populate that database, then charges the public more money for copies. (I think it's five cents a page or something like that.)

Is that the "property" you are defending?

The second case was JSTOR. Most experiments, etc., published in peer reviewed journals are produced with tax money. University wages are paid for, in a good proportion, with government money. I haven't looked into the funding of JSTOR itself, but I would bet in good conscience you will find federal grant money there.

Is that the "property" you are defending?

Note that JSTOR recovered the data and had dropped all charges. (Recovered is technically the wrong word because JSTOR never lost possession of its data. It recieved the physical hard drives with the copied data on them.)

It was the USA government that was going after Schwartz.

In other words, private individuals had decided their affairs among themselves and there were no victims. Yet the government wanted blood.

Is that the system you advocate?

I want no part of it.

You say, "nobody has convinced me" but I don't think you have looked too hard. Larry Lessig, for one, was a good friend of Schwartz. His stuff is all over the news. He believes Schwartz crossed an ethical line with the JSTOR case, but he also believes government bullying caused his suicide. Here are some reports:

Professor slams prosecutors for helping drive Aaron Swartz to suicide

Lessig on the DoJ's vindictive prosecution of Aaron Swartz

Prosecutor as bully (Larry Lessig's blog)

Wikipedia article: Aaron Swartz

Lessig argues in his grief-laden blog post that fifty years was totally outside of any sense of proportionality. The Wikipedia article also mentions a million dollars in fines. Here are some of Lessig's comments:

Since his arrest in January, 2011, I have known more about the events that began this spiral than I have wanted to know. Aaron consulted me as a friend and lawyer. He shared with me what went down and why, and I worked with him to get help. When my obligations to Harvard created a conflict that made it impossible for me to continue as a lawyer, I continued as a friend. Not a good enough friend, no doubt, but nothing was going to draw that friendship into doubt.

. . .

... if what the government alleged was true — and I say “if” because I am not revealing what Aaron said to me then — then what he did was wrong. And if not legally wrong, then at least morally wrong. The causes that Aaron fought for are my causes too. But as much as I respect those who disagree with me about this, these means are not mine.

But all this shows is that if the government proved its case, some punishment was appropriate. So what was that appropriate punishment? Was Aaron a terrorist? Or a cracker trying to profit from stolen goods? Or was this something completely different?

Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.

Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. 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.

. . .

That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.

. . .

... the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.

Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time.

Take comfort in knowing that the same kind of bureaucrat that went after Schwartz will be coming after you before too long if you own a gun.

Is that the government you want?

Because that's the one we've got right now.

Hey, here's an idea. Get in bed with a company that has pull with the government (like, say, a Hollywood studio). It will make sure your property is protected by the government, one way or another, and even get you some government grant money when things get tight. And it will help pass laws--like SOPA--that will keep competitors from entering your market, under the guise of ending the monkey-business.

To me, the issue isn't private property. It's the aristocracy of pull, to use Rand's phrase, and a whole lot of dirty tricks. All paid for by USA tax dollars.

Michael

[syrakusos]

1. I have free JSTOR access through two university accounts, my alma mater (Eastern Michigan University) and now the University of Texas, where I am but a guest patron of the library.

The libraries pay JSTOR; that's JSTOR's market. Also, the convenience of electronic access being what it is, nonetheless, you can walk into any university library and just read these journals in print. I do not know a single college private or public that bars its library, and the same goes for the local public libraries as well. Like churches - no surprise considering their origins - libraries want you to be there. Borrowing privileges, etc., are another matter, but anyone can read what is on the shelves. And when you make copies at the machines, you pay the library,not JSTOR or the authors. At UT, they have two computers connected to the microfilm readers to generate PDFs of materials, at no charge to you, because the great people of the Great State of Texas pay the rent.

2. As noted, these JSTOR articles are not generated as intellectual property beyond the common law understanding that you cite what you quote and you cannot put your name on what you did not write. The ethics of academic research demands publication specifically. First, it ensures intellectual honesty. This goes back to Robert Boyle's Skeptical Chymist (1661) which opened by declaiming against secret processes that could not be understoood and used by others. Moreover, the financial rewards that do accrue - tenure, research grants, contracts for textbooks and other materials - are enabled specifically by these free offerings, the proof of your pudding, as it were.

3.

...., was strongly biased against American corporations and opposed any role for money in politics. His view on economics and government spending seemed to be left-of-Krugman. In fact he seemed like a classic socialist anarchist. He wanted the Democrats to spend without regard for the debt limit and for Obama to feel no power from the Tea Party or congressional Republicans. He seemed sympathetic with the Occupy movement, ...

Henry Ford was a fascist and an anti-Semite. Thomas Edison electrocuted dogs to "prove" that alternating current is dangerous. Nicola Tesla was an obsessive who used 20 napkins each meal. Steve Jobs named his "Lisa" computer after the daughter he refused to acknowledge even after the paternity tests came back. Steve Wozniak paid off the family of a girl he killed while flying past his limits in his airplane. Oh, yes, and Ayn Rand.... well, never mind...

Psychologizing is not a valid argument against justice.

4. That said, I do caution against letting private law trump public law, lest we have anarchy, but I do agree that in the case of tort, "no blood, no foul" seems to work well to keep everyone out of court. Of course, as we know: cracking down on criminals is the only power any government has and when there aren't enough criminals, you make more.

5. Lest we demonize President Obama and his appointee, do not forget that it was Rudolph Giuliani who put Michael Milken in prison. Objectivists need to get over their infatuation with the Republican Party, but that's another topic.

[mfgreaves]

Michael,

I was as angry as you were when I first heard the news. "Murderers" was the word that (wrongly) came to my mind.

Calming down over several hours, and then following Lessig's twitter feed to Swartz, I found many confused and concerning ideas. It was only a matter of time till he got in trouble with the government.

Also it is wrong to suggest that the only property which he had no regard for was the JSTOR stuff. I can find no evidence of any regard for any property.

I also don't agree that he was a genius. RSS is important but simple, lots of people could have invented it at 14. Thousands.

It's still very sad to me.

[BaalChatzaf]

5. Lest we demonize President Obama and his appointee, do not forget that it was Rudolph Giuliani who put Michael Milken in prison. Objectivists need to get over their infatuation with the Republican Party, but that's another topic.

Good point! The Republicans have been as Statist as the Democrat Liberals. Alexander Hamilton would have fit in with the Republican gang perfectly.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Guyau]

Michael, this riposte is limited to the following:

. . .

The second case was JSTOR. Most experiments, etc., published in peer reviewed journals are produced with tax money. University wages are paid for, in a good proportion, with government money. I haven't looked into the funding of JSTOR itself, but I would bet in good conscience you will find federal grant money there.

Is that the "property" you are defending?
. . .

The presence of government money in papers handled by JSTOR does not melt the moral and legal rights of individuals and corporations in the contractual arrangements of JSTOR. If I submit a paper accepted by JARS, it is my property released to them only for showing in the displays (e.g. through JSTOR) they have allowed and announced, including required fees. (By copyright law, without special contract, I retain the right to further release my work to a site such as OL.) Yes, this property should be defended.

[syrakusos]

"In addition to her public service, Ms. Ortiz was a senior trial attorney at the law firm of Morisi & Associates, P.C., concentrating on civil, criminal, and governmental agency litigation."

Sorry for not linking to this, but the woman who prosecuted Martha Stewart now works in white collar defense for a law firm.

As a Myer-Briggs ENTJ myself, I appreciate the ability to argue both sides of an issue, but, ultimately, it stops being a game starts being real when people's lives are at stake and for lawyers (in general) they never seem to understand that. They just play the game like it was basketball or football, without any morality.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

What you say in #6 is what Rand believed when she wrote The Little Street. Fortunately, she got over it.

Pete,

This kept nagging at the back of my mind, so I have to say it. There is a critical difference. As far as I know, Hickman didn't invent anything. He just killed a little girl in the most brutal manner possible and was unrepentant.

(Rand liked his emotional posture and refusal to be intimidated, of course, not his actions.)

I would not be arguing the things I am for someone like Hickman. My focus is on criticizing people who use government guns and intimidation against productive brains.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

The presence of government money in papers handled by JSTOR does not melt the moral and legal rights of individuals and corporations in the contractual arrangements of JSTOR. If I submit a paper accepted by JARS, it is my property released to them only for showing in the displays (e.g. through JSTOR) they have allowed and announced, including required fees. (By copyright law, without special contract, I retain the right to further release my work to a site such as OL.) Yes, this property should be defended.

Stephen,

I'm not against that right.

I am against ham-fisted government payback for the SOPA debacle disguised as defense of that right.

Michael

[syrakusos]

The presence of government money in papers handled by JSTOR does not melt the moral and legal rights of individuals and corporations in the contractual arrangements of JSTOR. If I submit a paper accepted by JARS, it is my property released to them only for showing in the displays (e.g. through JSTOR) they have allowed and announced, including required fees. (By copyright law, without special contract, I retain the right to further release my work to a site such as OL.) Yes, this property should be defended.

I agree with the fundamental assumptions of property, of course, and from that we derive intellectual property rights. On that basis, a complete investigation of this problem still waits for description and resolution. 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?

I run into this all time when I take pictures on the street. People try to claim that I need their permission. Baloney. I. M. Pei vigorously defends his copyright ownership to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Unlike a JARS article, it is impossible not to see this thing. And I can paint or draw whatever is in my memory.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I also don't agree that he was a genius. RSS is important but simple, lots of people could have invented it at 14. Thousands.

Mike,

That's quite a statement.

I stand in awe.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

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.

Genius is a subjective term all over the map. Some geniuses are nothing but brilliant productive minds and some mix in a lot of character and courage with brain power. Brilliance can be somewhat objectified with various intelligence tests. For genius, you have to see the work.

I think Nathaniel Branden is a genius, for example, at least for inventing and applying the sentence completion technique in his therapeutic practice. He took sentence completion--call it the "wheel"--which he did not invent and added an axle and a cart and engine. So simple, obvious and effective--how could it be "genius"?

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

People who fiddled with round things were all normal.

There were oodels of those.

The person who came along, figured out how to put an axel on a round thing, and used it to move stuff was a genius.

Genius and IQ are not the same thing.

Michael

[Guyau]

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.

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

PS

JARS also obtains remuneration by copyright fees paid it by JSTOR. This income can possibly compensate Chris and others for their labor in producing the journal and alleviate any subsidies the journal has required for its material production (subscription fees likely cover less than a quarter of that cost).

[Roger Bissell]

My understanding is that there is typically a 6-month to one-year "embargo" on published journal articles -- and that, after that time has elapsed, the author can publish, post, or otherwise disseminate them as he sees fit. That is certainly how the rights to my JARS essays have been delineated to me thus far, and I have not signed anything that modifies those rights once the transfer to PSUP takes effect.

I was glad when Chris Sciabarra put the past issues of JARS online, for it meant that more scholars would be able to access and perhaps comment on the essays. I haven't discussed the effects of this free posting of the essays with other JARS writers yet, but in my experience, the free posting has had no discernable effect. I have gotten infinitely more feedback from the free but closed postings of my JARS pieces here on OL--and lots of it of fairly high quality.

Personally, I am glad that JARS is once again going to be "pay per view." People who would not subscribe to JARS because of their presumed poverty had a golden opportunity to download the freebies from the web site--and to repay the efforts of the authors of pieces in their field(s) of interest with some helpful comments and criticisms. But again, so far as I know, very little if anything has resulted from the free downloads.

REB

P.S. -- Some of my older JARS essays are still accessible from my personal web site, www.rogerbissell.com. More recent ones have been withheld, since they will be included in two forthcoming books: "The Logic of Liberty" and "Will the Real Apollo Please Stand Up?" I plan to self-publish the former this summer, the latter not for several more years, since I am still writing content for it that will first appear as JARS essays during the next couple of years.

[syrakusos]

Aaron Swartz at Startup conference, Kresge Auditorium MIT