The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is “partially” opposing a request by the estate of Aaron Swartz for the release of documents related to the investigation that led to Swartz’s arrest and prosecution in federal court. In court papers filed today, MIT counsel states that its opposition stems from two factors: its concerns about people in the MIT community named in… → Read More
Digital activist Aaron Swartz took his own life on January 11. Swartz was facing federal hacking charges after being arrested for downloading millions of articles from JSTOR from MIT’s network in excess of his access. Since Swartz’s suicide, activists, scholars, and legislators have been at work on reforms to the law under which he was prosecuted—the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. → Read More
Editor’s note: Richard Price is founder and CEO of Academia.edu, a platform for academics to share research papers.
Aaron Swartz was determined to free up access to academic articles. He perceived an injustice in which scientific research lies behind expensive paywalls, despite being funded by the taxpayer. The taxpayer ends up paying twice for the same research: once to fund it and a second… → Read More
The Aaron Swartz tragedy has unleashed an intense debate about computer “crime” and the US criminal justice system. Heavyweights like Lessig, Doctorow, Greenwald, Masnick, Wu and Kerr have all written with great passion about the case. But the one article that really resonated with me was written by the Harvard Business Review blogger James Allworth. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — have some fun with Facebook’s new GraphSearch and advances in medical techniques. We all agree that when Facebook says it’s not about search, well, it’s all about search. Should Google be quaking in its boots as @scobleizer shows the Jets and Giants parking lot in the post season that is Google+… → Read More
After accusations of overzealous prosecution and a whitehouse.gov petition with nearly 40,000 signatures calling for her removal, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz has issued a statement about the suicide of Aaron Swartz. In it, Ortiz defended her office’s handling of the case, saying its conduct was “appropriate” and that it would not have sought a decades-long prison sentence. → Read More
The US District Court in Massachusetts has dismissed the case against Aaron Swartz. Swartz committed suicide on January 11 after an investigation into his involvement in the theft of digital documents from JSTOR, a journal archive. → Read More
Nik Cubrilovic points out that people were significantly less enraged by Aaron’s legal troubles just a few months ago. → Read More
After news about Internet activist Aaron Swartz’s suicide on Friday started to spread across the Internet, many at least partly blamed MIT for the 26-year-old hacktivist’s death. This included his own family, which openly criticized the way MIT handled Swartz’s case after the school detected his attempts to download millions of articles from JSTOR in 2011. MIT president L. Rafael Reif today… → Read More
Digital activist and early employee at Reddit, Aaron Swartz, committed suicide in New York on January 11. He was 26.
Swartz was a fiery proponent of Internet freedom and the founder of DemandProgress.org. He was a co-creator of the RSS 1.0 standard and was a co-founder at Reddit. He writes about his career here. → Read More
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