Until he committed suicide in January at the age of 26, Aaron Swartz saw himself as a freedom fighter of the information age. The charismatic code writer and anti-copyright activist was arrested two years ago for breaking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer network to download 4.8m articles from the vast subscribers-only academic archive, Jstor. Federal prosecutors threw the book at Swartz, charging him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the vague Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA.
Some of Swartz’s friends, family and fans blamed the Obama administration’s justice department for hounding him, and MIT for having done so little to stop it. This week a report by two MIT professors, computer scientist Harold Abelson and Nobel Prize-winning economist Peter Diamond, and a former federal prosecutor found the university not culpable in Swartz’s death. It had been neutral, albeit short on empathy, they found. Rafael Reif, the university’s president, professed himself “confident that MIT’s decisions were reasonable, appropriate and made in good faith”. He is right, but seeing this requires us to separate the politics of the Swartz case from the tragedy of it.
Swartz had radical ideas about property. “It’s called stealing or piracy,” he wrote in his “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto”, “as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral – it’s a moral imperative.” His defenders agree. Scroll through the comments section of a Wired article and you can read their rationalisations. They combine Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s idea that property is theft and modern Republicans’ idea that government is theft: the academic papers Swartz stole did not really belong to Jstor because some of the research had been funded by government grants; copying files is not theft because the original owner is not deprived of them; universities’ responsibility to promote knowledge trumps their responsibility to respect property; and so on. Swartz’s suicide does not ennoble such ideas. But it does not discredit them, either. Our sense of intellectual property is changing, like it or not.