Manifesto

Aaron Swartz’s Manifesto

Swartz's 2008 manifesto said sharing information was a "moral imperative" and advocated for "civil disobedience" against copyright laws pushed by corporations "blinded by greed" that led to the "privatization of knowledge."

Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future.

Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them?

Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.

"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally; you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz

July 2008, Eremo, Italy

Source: The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a 501(c) (3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

The Internet Archive

Comments:

In a digital age the entire notion of copyright has to be revisited. Especially when it comes to academic information. Trying to protect material the way you protect books is like trying to regulate cars like covered wagons. It's about time for the government hacks to stop blindly enforcing antiquated laws and start thinking. Or groups like Anonymous will do it for them. ~ Writerdude2011

The hacker community has been maligned and praised, and it has deserved both. While we can all agree that theft is morally wrong, hackers responded to corrupt pricing and sought to make resources available to all, and some of them replied by creating the open source hardware and software models. Others became pirates and thought of themselves as Robin Hoods taking from the wealthy and delivering access to the poor. Some forward thinking companies like Wolfram and Adobe changed pricing models to lower economic barriers to access and surprise Piracy has diminished. Hackers understand the science and engineering is cooperative and have sought to open up academic papers, some of which they are the creators of. Why because the more people who have access the more people who can contribute to building on the collective knowledge of society which belongs to us all.

Academic publishers have in many cases miss-used there monopoly. Universities have supported it as a result of favors, but it is even damaging Universities with the high cost of maintaining Academic libraries. Theft may be wrong but the system is broken, and we do not to fix it. Some have gone to publishing in open source publications, but because they lack support of the mainstream they remain niche publications and one still has to deal with the broken system. This system needs to be hacked so it works for us all.

I am someone firmly on the side of Intellectual property but I think it should be as intended and favor creators, while being open for others to use and build upon. Maybe we should have non-exclusive licensing terms, but any one that uses pays a royalty fee schedule. This might generate companies that are just focused on R&D and promote more innovation. More importantly it brings the focus back to the creators.

Book printers or distributors can pay the author the rate, but then can charge whatever they want from hardcover leather bound editions to e-books.

I am sure there are many other ideas, but we do need to fix these things, because right now they hurt as much as they help. ~ Kimberly Peacock

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Your last line should read; this system needs to be FIXED so it works for us all. That's what adults do, they fix things. Criminals, HACK a system. Do you understand the difference? I would hope so, the rest of your comment seemed well thought through and a good argument for fixing the system. ~ tnana23boys

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Hacking has too connotations and you took the criminal one. Hacking is also tweaking a system, disassembling a system and re-engineering it.

The PC revolution started as hacks of the 2nd type. Open Source and Open Hardware are hacks as are the community of Makers.

The other side of the community would also point out that the barriers put up by some companies in their view are criminal. It costs very little to distribute electronic media, and yet pricing is still taking into account the past high expense for distribution, and companies have profited the difference and the end customer and the creators have not seen gains. They view the system as a racket. Criminal in fact. In their view government sanctions one group of criminals against another group. I will say that to some degree they have merit. Still two wrongs do not make a right, and Intellectual Property is a key to the future of us all.

Natural Monopolies should be regulated much like the old Telephone monopolies. That is a possible answer. We need the Patent Office to be overhauled. We need to reflect the interests of the creators more than companies. ~ Kimberly Peacock

Elizabeth Warren questioned seven regulators and asked them to recount the instances of when they had taken big financial institutions to trial. Warren told them, in what appeared to be a reference to Aaron Swartz, "There are district attorneys and United States attorneys out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example..."

Overzealous, power-mad prosecutors need to suffer dire consequences for such aggressive and devastating actions. I hope this investigation leads not only to their firing, but to some sort of successful civil action against the prosecutors, personally, by Aaron's parents. ~ beckola

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You don't know a single US Attorney do you? You don't know what lands on their desk on a daily basis, do you? You don't know the specifics of any of the cases they handle so you wouldn't know if any of them are "Overzealous, power-mad prosecutors". You don't know much do you. Mr. Swartz chose suicide instead of a deal that he would have had to serve 3 months in a white collar prison. Mr. Swartz had many issues you know nothing about that lead to his suicide. There was nothing criminal in prosecuting a criminal. ~ tnana23boys

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Ha! That's what little you know. My husband is an Ivy League attorney; I've met a few prosecutors in my life, some very well known, including DAs. So take your assumptions and keep you head in the sand in relation to how punitive prosecutors can be. There are more than a few people who have served sentences they should never have served because of these same kinds of overzealous prosecutors. If you don't know that, you truly know nothing. ~ beckola

Only malicious prosecutors would label Swartz's "Manifesto" as malicious intent. They got it backwards - it’s a crime to force felony charge and jail time so they can justify their unjustifiable. Swartz's "Manifesto" is every bit of the freedom of speech law should protect. It should suggest a conflict of interest between that and a system only care to protect cooperate interests

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The documents accessed are publicly available. How is accessing publicly available documents a crime?

What he did was violate the terms of service of MIT. How is violating a private company's terms of service a federal crime worth 35 years in prison?

Every single one of us that use computers are guilty of doing the exact same thing: committing federal crimes. It's only that a Federal Prosecutor hasn't decided to "Make an example" of us because we aren't prominent 1st Amendment advocates. One thing that drives the Feds crazy is Americans that exercise their Constitutional rights. ~ Comrade Rutherford

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It was not a locked server closet; it was an unlocked network closet. It is a campus that prides itself on openness.

As for the 35 years, they were shoving that at him in an attempt to get him to sign the plea, which required accepting 13 felonies in their entirety, something much harder to swallow than 6 months in jail. At the same time, litigation had drained him of a lot of money. He was a millionaire living in a studio apartment, not lavishly, who was practically bankrupted by this process.

The problem is the law itself, which allows prosecutors, under the ancient 1984 computer abuse and fraud laws, to levy these sort of penalties against citizens. ~ Bayho

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This is how deluded our own government has become: the truth is malicious. We live in a representative democracy with both economic and political markets, WHICH REQUIRE HONESTY AND TRANSPARENCY to operate properly according to our lord and savior Adam Smith; however, our government and most corporations do the opposite.

The FBI and the Justice Department are nothing but prostitutes for copyright corporations while the MPAA ratings system and the RIAA (collusionary organization) create illegal monopolies that our own government continues to sanction.

The tyranny that our founding fathers fought again wasn't just government tyranny but also the tyranny of a government monopoly known as the East India Company. ~ Mark Questions

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I personally suspect that in Aaron's case the law was an ASS.....I agree with his assessment that information, not harmful to the safety of the United States of America, should be available to all.

I further suspect, like so many of us, Aaron wished not brought no real harm to anyone. I acknowledge that I have not read the briefs, but my gut tells me the corporations and the law extended themselves well beyond the line in threatening this promising, sensitive young man. His suicide is a true American tragedy, based upon what I feel, and what I have read.

My heart goes out to his distraught family. ~ Jimsit

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I have a cousin that is a high ranking academic in a top university. It is in her and her students best interest to publish all their work on the internet for everyone, but people only interested in $ don't see the benefits, they only see the $ lost. The concept of intellectual property is really something new, ushered in with the age of neo-cons. When only the $ matters we all lose. It’s precisely why just about everything done in this country on a coprorate/govt level has been wrong minded for the last 30 yrs.

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If he wasn't guilty, why did he admit to taking the files and distributing them in violation of the university's rules and federal law? ~ Gone Long Gone

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The question is whether he violated federal law-which he did not admit. To see if he violated federal law you have to see what he was charged with-wire and computer fraud. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal had already ruled these statutes did not apply to this kind of behavior. So, the prosecutors would have had to win the legal issues at district, circuit and Supreme Court. Big questions whether there was a crime.

There was also a question as to whether the downloads would have been illegal even under the statutes. He had authority to download articles and he and a group of students could have downloaded them one at a time without issue. So the crime was he used a download program that did it faster?

~ Chaszer

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Justice Department, This is authoritarianism at its worst.

Norman Bliss