Aaron Swartz

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Aaron Swartz (2008)
Aaron Swartz (2012)

Aaron Hillel Swartz (born November 8, 1986 in Chicago , † January 11, 2013 in New York City ) was an American programmer , entrepreneur, author , political movement organizer and hacktivist ; best known as a co-founder of Reddit and for his work against internet censorship.

Life

Aaron Swartz was the son of Robert and Susan Swartz and had two brothers (Noah and Ben). At the age of 14, Swartz co-wrote the RSS 1.0 specification. He then became a member of a W3C working group responsible for the Resource Description Framework . He enrolled at Stanford University in 2006, but left after about a year to work at Y Combinator .

Swartz co-founded the startup Infogami, which later became part of Reddit . Reddit was taken over by Condé Nast Verlag in October 2006 ; the publishing group moved its headquarters to the Wired editorial office in San Francisco . Swartz continued to work there for Reddit until he was fired in early 2007. In September of the same year he created the website creation and hosting service Jottit with Simon Carstensen. In addition, Swartz was involved in the technical implementation of the Creative Commons licenses and was the technical director of the Open Library .

Swartz lived for a while in Cambridge , Massachusetts , where he served on the Board of Change Congress . He wrote articles for Wikipedia and ran unsuccessfully for the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2006 .

In July 2008, wrote in Swartz Eremo, Italy, the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto and then released under the Creative Commons License Public Domain Mark 1.0 public domain . In it, he explicitly speaks out against the privatization of knowledge and thus laid an argumentative basis for the radical wing of the open access movement by calling for academic articles to be made freely available without regard to copyright . With the manifesto he pursued the goal of revealing his views, pointing out grievances and recruiting new open access supporters. It begins with the words: "Information is power." (Eng. "Information is power.") And ends with the prompting question: "Will you join us?" (Eng. " Will you join us ?"). The central message of the text is the statement that the sharing of knowledge is not immoral, but a moral necessity: "But sharing isn't immoral - it's a moral imperative". With this in mind, Swartz calls on students, scholars and librarians, whom he regards as privileged, to share their access to scientific work with others. He also describes illegal actions that he believes are necessary in order to gain access to such documents, and thus put prevailing moral concepts in the scientific community up for discussion.

In 2009 Swartz published around 20 million pages of court decisions that he had downloaded the previous year from the PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) database, which was freely accessible through some libraries on a trial basis . The process was legal; Swartz intended to create a searchable archive. The documents are now accessible in the Internet Archive .

In 2010, as a fellow at the Safra Center at Harvard University , he investigated the sources from which contributions to legal journals were funded. That year he was one of the founders of the Demand Progress group , which campaigned against the Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA in the United States .

On July 19, 2011, Swartz was charged with illegally downloading 4.8 million scientific articles from the JSTOR journal archive . After handing the data over to JSTOR, the operator announced that it would not make any civil claims against Swartz. The case was followed up by prosecutor Stephen Heymann. He was released on bail of $ 100,000. If convicted, he could face up to 35 years' imprisonment and a heavy fine. In September 2011, JSTOR announced that it would make the public domain portion of the magazine's texts public, and on January 9, 2013, they announced that they would make 4.5 million articles available free of charge for a limited time.

Before the start of the trial, which was scheduled for April 2013, Swartz, who had suffered from depression for years, committed suicide . He was found dead by his girlfriend on January 11, 2013 in his Brooklyn apartment . After his death, classified as a suicide by the responsible US authorities, criticism of the public prosecutor was voiced, among others, from relatives and friends. She was accused of complicity in the death of Swartz, she should have acted "excessive" in the process, especially since JSTOR had not filed a complaint itself. In retrospect, she assured her that Swartz had been able to reduce her claim to six months in prison by admitting guilt. The legal scholar Lawrence Lessig , who was referred to as Swartz's mentor, expressed criticism of the prosecution's approach, but did not want to endorse the thesis of complicity. Is also the MIT for various reasons the blame or wrongdoing alleged.

Swartz was buried on January 15, 2013 in Highland Park , Illinois . Tim Berners-Lee , the founder of the World Wide Web , gave one of the funeral speeches. Three days earlier he had dedicated a poem to Swartz. Another funeral speaker was Lawrence Lessig .

The Aaron Swartz case was investigated on behalf of MIT in 2013 by Hal Abelson , a professor at MIT. He found no fault on the part of the university, as MIT had behaved neutrally (Swartz had tapped the MIT network with a laptop on the MIT premises to download the files from JSTOR).

filming

On June 27, 2014, the crowdfunded documentary The Internet's Own Boy was released. It covers the life and work of Aaron Swartz from his childhood until his death. Brian Knappenberger's film premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival . The internationally acclaimed film was shortlisted for the 2015 Oscar nomination in the “Best Documentary” category, but was not nominated. The German version Death of an Internet Activist was broadcast for the first time on January 7, 2015 on the public broadcaster ZDFinfo .

Fonts

See also

literature

Filmography

  • 2005: Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks
  • 2006: Steal This Film
  • 2007: Steal This Film II
  • 2012: War for the Web
  • 2014: The Internet's Own Boy - The Story of Aaron Swartz
  • 2020: Steal this Sports Broadcast

Web links

Commons : Aaron Swartz  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Jewish funerals
  2. ^ Aaron Swartz: Flight Report. March 25, 2003, accessed on July 13, 2015 (English): "my brother Ben"
  3. ↑ Aaron Swartz: Stanford: Sunday, December 5 , February 6, 2005, accessed on July 13, 2015 (English): "My brother Noah"
  4. ^ Aaron Schwartz: How to get a job like mine, August 18, 2008
  5. ↑ Philipp Lenssen: "A Chat with Aaron Swartz" . Retrieved July 20, 2011.
  6. ↑ - ( Memento from May 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Swartz, Aaron (2008). Guerilla Open Access Manifesto , accessed January 27, 2013.
  8. ↑ Stöcker, Christian; Reissmann, Ole (2013). Reactions to the death of Aaron Swartz: "We have lost a wise man." Spiegel Online. Last accessed January 27, 2013.
  9. ^ John Schwartz: An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy , February 12, 2009, in: The New York Times.
  10. ↑ a b Rötzer, Florian: "Internet activist is accused of mass stealing science articles" . Telepolis. Retrieved July 20, 2011.
  11. ↑ Kevin Poulsen: Aaron Swartz, Coder and Activist, Dead at 26. In: Wired. January 12, 2013, accessed January 12, 2013 .
  12. ^ Punitive Damages, Remunerated Research, and the Legal Profession ( Memento of October 29, 2011 in the Internet Archive ), Volume 61, Issue 3 - December 2008
  13. ^ Tech Prodigy and Internet Activist Aaron Swartz Commits Suicide. In: Time Magazine. January 13, 2013, accessed January 13, 2013 .
  14. ^ A b John Schwartz: Aaron Swartz, Precocious Programmer and Internet Activist, Dies at 26. In: New York Times . January 12, 2013.
  15. ↑ Reddit co-founder and RSS co-author. Child prodigy Aaron Swartz is dead. In: Spiegel Online. January 12, 2013, accessed January 13, 2013 .
  16. ↑ "... there remain many people who are not affiliated with institutions who want access to the knowledge preserved in JSTOR" ( JSTOR - Free Access to Early Journal Content and Serving "Unaffiliated" Users )
  17. ^ A b Online activist Aaron Swartz - Freedom or Death. spiegel.de. January 13, 2013, accessed January 13, 2013 .
  18. ↑ Christian Stöcker, Ole Reissmann: Reactions to the death of Aaron Swartz: "We have lost a wise man". Spiegel Online , January 14, 2013, accessed January 20, 2013 .
  19. ^ Daniel Müller: Requiem for a hacker. How American internet activists politically instrumentalize a suicide. In: Die Zeit No. 5/2013, January 24, 2013, p. 2.
  20. ↑ jnb: Death of Aaron Swartz: University asks for questions for clarification . Mirror online. January 25, 2013. Retrieved January 25, 2013.
  21. ^ Gallardo, Michelle, January 15, 2013, Aaron Swartz, Reddit co-founder, remembered at funeral , ABC News. Retrieved January 15, 2013
  22. ↑ Tim Berners-Lee: Aaron is dead
  23. ↑ Aaron Swartz funeral: Internet prodigy mourned in Highland Park . Chicago Tribune. January 15, 2013. Retrieved May 4, 2015.
  24. ↑ What It Was Like Attending Aaron Swartz's Funeral . ReadWrite. January 16, 2013. Retrieved May 4, 2015.
  25. ↑ Abelson et al. a .: MIT and the Prosecution of Aaron Swartz (Swartz Report)
  26. ↑ The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz ( English ) Retrieved on July 3, 2014.
  27. ↑ Markus Beckedahl : From the Oscar shortlist to the ZDF media library: Death of an Internet activist. netzpolitik.org , January 7, 2015, accessed on January 7, 2015 (German).
  28. ↑ Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks. Retrieved July 9, 2020 .
  29. ↑ Steal This Film. Retrieved July 9, 2020 .
  30. ↑ Steal This Film II. Retrieved July 9, 2020 .
  31. ^ War for the Web. Retrieved July 9, 2020 .
  32. ↑ The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz. Retrieved July 9, 2020 .
  33. ↑ Steal This Sports Broadcast. Retrieved July 9, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Swartz, Aaron
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Swartz, Aaron Hillel (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political movement organizer, and hacktivist
DATE OF BIRTH November 8, 1986
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago , Illinois
DATE OF DEATH January 11, 2013
Place of death New York City