| Aaron Swartz | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 8, 1986 Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| Occupation | Software developer, writer, Internet activist |
| Website | |
| aaronsw.com | |
Aaron Swartz (born November 8, 1986) is an American programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist. He is best known in programming circles for co-authoring the RSS 1.0 specification. He received mainstream media attention after his federal indictment and arrest on 19 July 2011, for allegedly harvesting academic journal articles from JSTOR.[1]
Swartz is the co-founder of Demand Progress and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. He currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Swartz was active in discussions of Internet standards from an early age, and co-authored the specification for RSS by the time he was 14. Since then he has been a member of the W3C's RDF Core Working Group, co-designed the formatting language Markdown with John Gruber, and worked on many other projects.
Swartz attended Stanford University for a year, leaving to start the software company Infogami, a startup that was funded by Y Combinator's first Summer Founders Program. Infogami was built around a wiki backend, a subject of interest for Swartz since his early effort to develop theinfo, a wiki-based encyclopedia, in 2000.
Within a year, Infogami merged with Reddit to form not a bug, though the latter group failed to take off. In late 2006, Reddit was sold to CondéNet (the online arm of Condé Nast Publications and the owners of Wired) and Swartz moved with his company to San Francisco. In January 2007, Swartz was asked to resign from his position at Wired Digital.[2]
In September 2007, Swartz, together with Simon Carstensen, launched Jottit, a website service quite similar to Infogami. Jottit was launched from bitbots.net, a project by Swartz and Carstensen. Swartz is also the creator of the web.py web application framework, based on the Python programming language, which is used by Jottit (and previously reddit).
Swartz then went to work for the Internet Archive, serving as the software architect for the new Open Library project, building on work from infogami.
Swartz is an active blogger and has written a number of widely read essays on his blog. Two of his most well-known pieces are "Who Writes Wikipedia",[3] an article examining the contributions to Wikipedia articles written during his candidacy for the Wikimedia Foundation board election in 2006, and "HOWTO: Be More Productive",[4] an article on personal productivity.
In recent years, Swartz has worked primarily on social analysis and political activism. He worked on watchdog.net, and serves on the board of Change Congress. In 2010 he became a fellow at Harvard University's Safra Center for Ethics.
Swartz co-founded Demand Progress, a progressive advocacy group that organizes people via email and other media for "contacting Congress and other leaders, funding pressure tactics, and spreading the word" about targeted issues.
In 2009, Swartz downloaded and publicly released approximately 20% of the PACER database of United States federal court documents managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.[5][6] He had accessed the system as part of a free trial of PACER at 17 libraries around the country, which was suspended "pending an evaluation" as a result of Swartz's actions. Those actions also brought him under investigation by the FBI, but the case was closed two months later with no charges being filed.[7]
On Tuesday, 19 July 2011, Swartz was charged by U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer, in relation to downloading roughly 4 million academic journal articles from JSTOR.[8] According to the indictment against him, Swartz surreptitiously attached a laptop to MIT's computer network, which allowed him to "rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR."[9] Prosecutors in the case claim Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available on P2P file-sharing sites.[10]
Swartz surrendered to authorities, pleading not guilty on all accounts, and was released on $100,000 bail. Prosecution of the case continues, with charges of wire fraud and computer fraud, resulting in a potential prison term of up to 35 years and a fine of up to $1 million USD.[11] JSTOR put out a statement saying they would not pursue civil litigation against Swartz.[12]
Jerry Cohen of Burns & Levinson said the government's choice to pursue criminal charges when JSTOR and MIT had resolved their civil concerns with Swartz reflected a trend of increasingly-zealous prosecution in federal courts.[13]
On September 7, 2011, JSTOR announced that they released the public domain content of their archives for public viewing and limited use. According to JSTOR, they have been working on making those archives public for some time, and the recent controversy, involving, according to a press release, "an individual who was indicted for downloading a substantial portion of content from JSTOR, allegedly for the purpose of posting it to file sharing sites", made them "press ahead" with the initiative.[14]