Aaron Swartz internet freedom fighter found dead in his Brooklyn apartment. Struggled for years against a legal system that he felt had not caught up to the information age. Federal prosecutors had tried unsuccessfully to mount a case against him for publishing reams of court documents that normally cost a fee to download. He helped lead the campaign to defeat a law that would have made it easier to shut down websites accused of violating copyright protections.
Swartz was only the latest face of a decades-old movement in the computer science world to push more information into the public domain. His case highlights society's uncertain, evolving view of how to treat people who break into computer systems and share data not to enrich themselves, but to make it available to others. Underlying Swartz's work was a passionate belief that vigilance was needed to ensure that the internet remained open to all and that restrictions were not quietly passed that would have a huge impact on all of our access to information.
Swartz's activism is with respect to copyright. He was not looking for people who are rights holders not be able to get paid, he wasn't one of these people who thought there should be no such thing as copyright. He wanted to liberate public access documents that we pay for as taxpayers like in research institutions and elsewhere that should be free for people to access and use."
. Even some of the biggest companies, some of the biggest internet companies to put it frankly, would benefit from a world in which their little competitors could get censored."
No comments:
Post a Comment