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Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica)
Ars technica reports
that the United States Attorney has dropped the pending charges against
Aaron Swartz. ""In support of this dismissal, the government states that Mr. Swartz died on January 11, 2013," wrote Carmen Ortiz, the United States Attorney for the District Court of Massachusetts.
Swartz faced legal charges after he infamously downloaded a huge cache of documents from JSTOR. Over the weekend, Swartz' family said the aggressive legal tactics of the US Attorney's office contributed to his suicide."
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Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica) Posted Jan 14, 2013 22:39 UTC (Mon) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]
For all the criticism people have lobbed at the federal prosecution one cannot say that they were unsuccessful.
The government alleged that Aaron planned to make the publications (— works by unpaid authors, often funded by tax money) available to everyone as a political statement about access to knowledge. I expect their strategy in being so aggressive was to discourage anyone else from trying the same thing.
To the millions of people outside the ivory halls of academic these works remain unavailable.
Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica) Posted Jan 14, 2013 22:54 UTC (Mon) by burki99 (subscriber, #17149) [Link]
The Government is one part of the story and it is hard to speculate about the exact motives of the prosecutor. But the other part is JSTOR and they did react in multiple ways since the incidence in 2011: First they settled any civil claims they might have had against Aaron in June 2011 (http://about.jstor.org/statement-swartz) and they started a Register and Read programme a short while ago. This offer - while not giving everything to everybody for free - will in effect give most people access the many works without any costs (http://about.jstor.org/rr). So I don't feel it is correct to write that "[t]o the millions of people outside the ivory halls of academic these works remain unavailable." The story is sad enough as it is. But the world of academic publishing - at least in the humanities - seems to be turning slowly towards the direction he envisioned, even if it may seem much to slowly to everyone who shares his ideals.
Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica) Posted Jan 14, 2013 23:25 UTC (Mon) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]
Indeed there is progress— but please take care to not overstate it: You're talking about a _brand new_ program allows page-at-a-time access to works which are five years old and older, only in a subset of journals, only under a draconian terms of service, and subject to a substantial and easily hit rate-limit. You could, though somewhat uncharitably, call this a sales technique more than a real improvement to access. Though it is a real improvement, if a disappointing one.
Allowing the industry to move at its convince and by its own terms— if it even moves at all— is the kind of opportunity afforded by such harshness in the interest of preserving prohibitions which would otherwise be so easily eroded because of their fragility and obvious, to many, wrongness for society.
Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica) Posted Jan 15, 2013 11:59 UTC (Tue) by dps (subscriber, #5725) [Link]
JSTOR is not a journal but an archive of older journal archives from lots of journals.
Unlike some similar things I don't actually have to visit a library to use JSTOR :-) As an aluminus of an appropriate university I can actually use JSTOR but appreciate that random members of the public can't.
Even if you have a degree some articles necessarily assume knowledge you don't have and are therefore hard to understand. I have insufficient knowledge of bilinear forms to cope with the current best result for matrix multiplication or judge the odds of a related O(n^{2+epsilon}) algorithm.
The only people that do not want random people to be able to obtain academic journal articles without paying and those who charge $$$$$$$ for subscriptions. None of the other people get paid anything.
Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica) Posted Jan 15, 2013 14:46 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>As an aluminus of an appropriate university I can actually use JSTOR
How does this work? Did you have to sign up while a student and get an account that you can then keep, or do JSTOR have some way of confirming that you are indeed an alumnus of the university in question?
Access to JSTOR Posted Jan 17, 2013 18:05 UTC (Thu) by dps (subscriber, #5725) [Link]
I think that I get some credentials that can be presented to JSTOR and grants me access the article stored there. I don't about the library's relationship with JSTOR, which has more liberal access policies than some journals and other online resources.
All I need is a graduation year and aluminus card number.
Other universities also offer something similar and I think the people behind JSTOR actually wanted to offer wider access. They may depend on academia for funding and think that those funds would not come if JSTOR was free for everybody.
I also don't know the details of the agreements that JSTOR has with the archived journals, which may preclude free access for the general public. A few people might pay the $$$$ per article charges.
Access to JSTOR Posted Jan 22, 2013 11:16 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>aluminus card number.
That's interesting. A quick Google says they do exist for some universities in this country, but not the one I went to AFAICT which explains why I've never heard of such a thing.
Access to JSTOR Posted Jan 22, 2013 11:55 UTC (Tue) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]
It's up to the university to do the authentication. So for 3 the places I've been with JSTOR access I've been redirected to a university page to enter username / password, and once that has been satisfied I'm passed back to JSTOR logged in.
Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica) Posted Jan 15, 2013 14:21 UTC (Tue) by philh (subscriber, #14797) [Link]
> To the millions of people outside the ivory halls of academic these works remain unavailable.
but perhaps not for long:
http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/ -- Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR Liberator
Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica) Posted Jan 15, 2013 14:55 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
Where are the documents going to?
Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica) Posted Jan 15, 2013 19:51 UTC (Tue) by philh (subscriber, #14797) [Link]
Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica) Posted Jan 14, 2013 23:05 UTC (Mon) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] the United States Attorney has dropped the pending charges against Aaron Swartz. Well they have to. AIUI, in the U.S. legal system no one can pursue legal action (criminal or otherwise) against a deceased person. The whole incident stinks, and I'm truly saddened by Swartz's death. I built my own RSS aggregator Web page back in 2005, and I never realized (until just the other day) that a brilliant 14-year old prodigy helped write the specification. In Memoriam to Aaron Swartz.
Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica) Posted Jan 15, 2013 8:19 UTC (Tue) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]
This comment led me to Wikipedia which made me realise that this guy was only 26! What a waste. I can't begin to feel what his family and friends must be passing through :-((
Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica) Posted Jan 17, 2013 13:50 UTC (Thu) by freemars (subscriber, #4235) [Link] The US Attorney is now backpedaling furiously -- "a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting" (http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/01/17/us-attorney-statement-on-the-prosecution-of-aaron-swartz/). It's too bad Atty Ortiz didn't manage to convince Swartz or his lawyer that was the case.
Government formally drops charges against Aaron Swartz (ars technica) Posted Jan 17, 2013 17:42 UTC (Thu) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]
What a ludicrous statement. That the attorney general would ever indicate they'd be lenient, when they were prosecuting a political target for a made-up crime.
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