“The world was a better place with him in it,” he said. Swartz “uncompromising, principled, smart, flawed, loving, caring, and brilliant.”
Norton said, and she characterized him “in turns tough and delicate.” He had “struggled with chronic, painful illness as well as depression,” she said, without specifying the illness, but he was still hopeful “at least about the world.”Ĭory Doctorow, a science fiction author and online activist, posted a tribute to Mr. Swartz did not talk much about his impending trial, Quinn Norton, a close friend, said on Saturday, but when he did, it was clear that “it pushed him to exhaustion. That should never have been considered a criminal activity.” Swartz’s actions at M.I.T., “access to knowledge and access to justice have become all about access to money, and Aaron tried to change that. Malamud said that while he did not approve of Mr. Ortiz, a United States attorney, pressed on, saying that “stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.” Swartz turned over his hard drives with 4.8 million documents, and JSTOR declined to pursue the case. by means that included gaining entry to a utility closet on campus and leaving a laptop that signed into the university network under a false account, federal officials said. In an effort to provide free public access to JSTOR, he broke into computer networks at M.I.T. Swartz went beyond that, according to a federal indictment. The federal government investigated but did not prosecute. Swartz recalled in a 2009 interview, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.” He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while and then called his mother. As he recalled in a newspaper account, “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.” He recalled telling Mr. Malamud feared that legal trouble might follow even though he felt they had violated no laws. The government shut down the free library program, and Mr.
AARON SCHWARTZ DOWNLOAD
Swartz wrote an elegant little program to download 20 million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20 percent of the enormous database.
AARON SCHWARTZ FOR FREE
Malamud’s efforts to make the documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for free access, Mr. The database charges 10 cents a page for documents activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of, have long argued that such documents should be free because they are produced at public expense. In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents. But he also found trouble when he took part in efforts to release information to the public that he felt should be freely available.