First, Aaron was as much our country as the people who persecuted him. He cared about it; you should too.
You can react two ways: 1) impotent anger or 2) stand up and continue his fight. Which will it be?
Find friends and others and we can all pitch in to create a method of distributing knowledge in a way that can't be controlled. The internet makes it possible, the only thing missing is the will and the effort. Anyone can contact me: my email's in my profile.
US justice system has so much inconsistencies. Punishment for copyright cases being harsher than the ones for Actual crimes being one of them. Lets not forget that he is being called criminal because he broke a law, a silly thing signed into law probably because someone lobbyed so hard for it. He is no actual criminal. He didn't feel the articles he downloaded from servers should be kept private. At least the research papers funded with public money should be public property. But so much pressure was put on him that he took his own life. If justice system was fair, he could've faced it. But currently the system is broken. He knew that and felt hopeless. Pushing for things like banning him from all things electronic, and thus internet, is not the right way to serve justice. What reforms have taken place since then?
> He is no actual criminal. He didn't feel the articles he downloaded from servers should be kept private.
That is a horrible argument. should I just be able to take your tv because I think it shouldn't be locked up in your house?
I'm not saying I agree with the papers being locked up. Not believing in a law does not make you innocent. Many people think they don't have to pay their taxes and they all go to jail.
I realize the ridiculousness of comment I made, but I wasn't originally talking about tv.
Aaron has made possible free access to many documents that were being charged for access, but they are actually documents that should be in public domain.
JSTOR is journal store which contains journals published by researchers all over the world. JSTOR access is licensed. There is no open access and the access fees are not cheap for something that is digitalized. Does JSTOR compensate the original article publisher? Aaron Swartz was only trying to make this archive public. He could've used an alternative way to achieve that goal. But does he actually deserve 30 to 50 years in prison and a million in fine for what he did?
I wouldn't have had a problem with it if those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis were given an appropriate punishment, say 500 years in jail time and fined at least a few billions.
Again I'm not saying I agree with the way he was prosecuted but he did commit a lot of crimes. Whether or not you agree with the ends he was aiming for doesn't change the facts.
I think projects like sci-hub are definitely a step in that direction, and the more projects that leverage the legal arbitrage and technical capabilities that exist today the better.
I'd be interested in trying to help someone who lives outside of the US figure out how to come up with something similar but for all the data that is trapped behind the facebooks and the like. I did something like this before, but I got hit with a C&D, but the technical capabilities are still available to leverage to weaken facebooks hold on personality information if one can side step the jurisdiction of such legal tools.
I used to stand when the national anthem would come on and deeply be thankful for what I had.