Guilty as not charged (yet)

Noam Cohen has an article in The New York Times about the price of downloading:

A guy walks into a candy store and sees one of those “leave a penny, take a penny” trays. He picks it up, cups his hands, and asks: “What can I get for 68 cents?”
That image came to mind with the case of Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old agitator for free access to information on the internet, who managed to download more than four million articles and reviews onto his laptop computers from a subscription-only digital storehouse. The material was from some of the most prestigious and expensive scientific and literary journals in the world.
Like the penny opportunist, Swartz was invited to sample the wares of the nonprofit online collection Jstor, and he interpreted that invitation quite expansively. Using a program that automatically paged through each issue of more than thirteen hundred journals, he was able to methodically download their contents, making a copy of almost everything in the collection.
Yet this episode is hardly a joke. Swartz was arrested last week in Boston on a series of felony counts including wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. If convicted on all counts, the Justice Department said he could face up to 35 years in prison and one million dollars in fines.
Swartz is not a run-of-the-mill hacking suspect. He has been known for his computer work since he was fourteen, when he was involved in developing the software behind RSS feeds, which distribute content over the internet. At the time the investigation began, he was a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, though he was later placed on leave.
Swartz did not respond to an email seeking comment. His lawyer would not comment other than to note that Swartz had pleaded not guilty to the indictment, which “puts everything in it in dispute”.
It should be emphasized, however, that Swartz was not trying to profit from his activities. He has been a fierce advocate of redistributing information, so much so that in 2008 he promoted a Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto (no longer available online) that said it was imperative to “take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies, and share them with the world”.
We are not talking about the latest X-Men movie or Lady Gaga album. Rather, it is the research contained in specialized scientific journals with subscriptions that can cost thousands of dollars; institutions can pay tens of thousands of dollars to Jstor. which stands for Journal Storage, for a subscription that bundles these publications online. That money, Jstor says, is needed to collect and distribute the material and, at times, subsidize institutions that cannot afford it. Founded in 1995, Jstor started with ten journals available to a few American universities, and has since expanded to include about 325,000 journal issues available at more than seven thousand institutions.
His supporters question why the government has reacted so strongly. “This makes no sense,” said David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress, an organization Swartz founded to rally support online for an open internet. “It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”
The government had its own interpretation of what Swartz did. “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars,” the United States attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen M. Ortiz, said last week in a statement about the case. “It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.”
In the government indictment, Swartz is described as becoming more and more devious in his downloading, signing on with a fake name as a visitor to the MIT campus, and then, when detected, taking more serious steps. At one point, the government says, he tried to get access to the university’s network at a wiring closet, and in an attempt to evade security cameras “held his bicycle helmet like a mask to shield his face, looking through ventilation holes in the helmet”.
It is a tricky situation for Jstor, which got back the hard drives containing its material from Swartz. It sees itself as having the long-term objective of “continuously adding more content and making it affordably available to more people around the world”. Asked if it was pleased that someone misusing the service could be brought to justice, a spokeswoman for Jstor wrote in an email response: “We wanted the content back, and we were able to secure it and ensure it wasn’t distributed. We were not interested in further legal action around this incident. We have no comment on the prosecution or how they have chosen to characterize it.”
Courtroom battles over file-sharing, as well as the persistent question of whether copying is “stealing”, are old hat. But the seriousness of the charges, the nature of the material and the motives behind Swartz’s actions lend the case a political edge for many people who grew up with the internet.
Demand Progress has highlighted the Swartz case on its website, and it says 45,000 people have “signed” its online petition to “stand with Aaron Swartz and his lifetime of work on ethics in government and academics”.
While the group Students for Free Culture, an international organization working to promote free culture ideals, wrote in an email that it had no official position on the Swartz prosecution, the group said it was no surprise that the topic would interest college students. “One reason that free-culture issues are popular (and not perceived as overly technical or legalistic) is that censorship, copyright abuses, privacy violations, shady network management, and other bad behaviors are actually shocking for people who rely on the network for everyday communication,” the group wrote. “They undermine expectations that have built up over years and years of use.”
For Glenn Greenwald, a blogger for Salon and an outspoken critic of the government’s treatment of Bradley E. Manning, the soldier accused of providing secret files later released by WikiLeaks, it also makes sense that a young generation would view the internet in political terms. “How information is able to be distributed over the internet, it is the free speech battle of our times,” he said in interview. “It can seem a technical, legalistic movement if you don’t think about it that way.” He said that point was illustrated by his experience with WikiLeaks, and by how the internet became a battleground as the site was attacked by hackers and as large companies tried to isolate WikiLeaks. Looking at that experience and the Swartz case, he said, “clearly the government knows that this is the prime battle, the front line for political control.”
WikiLeaks itself made the link, writing, in part: “Keep fighting Mr. Swartz, history is on your side.”
In a comment posted online, Gregory Maxwell, 31, a programmer from northern Virginia, wrote that the Swartz case had caused him to rethink his own actions. He said he had long kept thousands of digital copies of issues from the early years of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which are available at Jstor, but that he had never shared them. “I’ve been afraid that if I published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who profit from controlling access to these works,” he said. Noting the arrest of Swartz, he wrote: “I now feel that I’ve been making the wrong decision.” He made the entire file available last week, and did not do it anonymously. “One reason I put my name on the release is that I strongly believe that, if any legal action is taken against me, it will be an unjust one,” he wrote, “and I intend to fight it so that other people have less to be afraid of.”
Pennies for everyone.

Rico says if the guy was at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, that's a joke, right? But he doesn't post anything here that isn't readily available on the internet, and always credits the originator. If they want to come after him, they know where he is (and that he doesn't have any money)...