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Aaron Swartz commits suicide

tech.mit.edu

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Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#371

Post by betterunix »

SEMW wrote: post #282
jacques_chester wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prosecutors can usually act on their own initiative. It's because of the historical legal concept that an offence against a person is really an offence against the Crown. So the Crown takes a legal monopoly on force and logically, this means that the Crown gets to decide what to pursue. The USA inherited this concept from England. What I was trying to say above is that a prosecutor's goal is to prosecute as many case…

> What I was trying to say above is that a prosecutor's goal is to prosecute as many cases as fully as possible. They do not consider whether it is meritorious to pursue a case according to some outside moral standard, that's not their job. I have no idea what the situation is in the US. But here in England that's just not true. The CPS (Crown Prosecution Service)'s job is not to bring all the prosecutions that it be…

The situation in the US is this: prosecutors advance their careers by winning cases. It makes no difference whether or not the cases serve the public interest or even if those who are convicted are guilty. There are a lot of people in America -- possibly a majority -- who love the "law and order" approach to government and who will vote for a lawyer-turned-politician who runs on a right-wing platform and points to his history of throwing people in prison. If you want to see just how out-of-control this can get, read about the Kern County child sex abuse prosecutions from the 1980s, where one prosecutor proudly put dozens of innocent men and women in prison for crimes that never happened.

There is also an established system of prosecuting people the government does not like, and of robbing them of their ability to build a good defense -- usually by freezing their assets before they have been convicted, and building enormous cases against them that overwhelm their attorneys. I suspect Swartz was a victim of these tactics, probably because the government wanted to drive home the message that human knowledge must remain locked behind university firewalls and that hacking is a heinous offense. I would not put it past them to include Swartz' suicide in future propaganda about copyrights, as evidence that copyright infringement leads people to depression and suicide.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#372

Post by betterunix »

n09n wrote: post #363
polarix wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the sum total of human academic knowledge. It must be freed. The first tragic thing was that he failed to torrent it immediately. Now this. A great loss.

>It must be freed. That doesn't follow.

That depends on your philosophy about knowledge. If you believe that the ability to communicate our knowledge to each other and to future generations is our most important advantage, then anything that makes it easier to access knowledge is a good thing. If instead you believe that individuals should profit from their knowledge, Swartz is just as bad as JSTOR and our government is corrupt for not prosecuting the lot of them (most of the people whose articles were downloaded were probably paid nothing for their writing).

Or, maybe you believe that corporations are our saviors and therefore anything that goes against their interests is a bad thing. In which case the government is doing exactly what it should be doing.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#373

Post by tesmar2 »

betterunix wrote: post #364
tesmar2 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is terrible news, but, not knowing much about the case, how was it morally right to download a bunch of pay-for documents?

Anyone with access to a university network has access to those documents. I have access to JSTOR also. What moral issue can you possibly raise with someone using their access to download these documents? It's OK to download 10, but not 1000000? Do you have a moral issue with automated downloads -- and if so, how can you justify JSTOR itself? It is worth noting that JSTOR did not want to press charges in this case. Af…

> Anyone with access to a university network has access to those documents

The JSTOR site says "Libraries and organizations license full-text content for their patrons, and if you are affiliated with one of these institutions, you can access those complete articles."

Their site seems to say anyone with a uni affiliation.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#374

Post by brainless »

icelancer wrote: post #169
brainless wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ from what you are saying. I do understand your point though, but let me give you another picture. And this I say from personal experience. People around the world go through tough times. For some the path is eased by good friends, family, "miracles", etc. For others the path becomes too difficult to tackle. In the end the person chooses not to fight any longer. As much as we should respect this decisi…

>Every person who has every felt disturbed and suicidal and did not take the step, probably feels good about not taking the step. This is the ultimate example of survivorship bias. Please don't use this line of "argument." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Maybe I put it in the wrong way. But the way I see it, he was a person with dreams. He wanted to go great things. Do you really think such a person wants to die? He was an activist - he lived doing stuff. Dead people can not. I am sure if he could think about it rationally, he was brilliant enough to understand that.

So I personally believe whatever happened is because he felt this was the only escape. To me, again me personally, suicide is no glorified option.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#375

Post by betterunix »

petercooper wrote: post #160
rdl wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't even call it a 'white collar crime'. It was downloading some scientific papers, which the site didn't really care about. White collar crime is like Bernie Madoff.

True, I didn't realize white collar crime had a financial motivation. So, it was even less serious than that.

"So, it was even less serious than that."

I would say that it was about as serious as parking in a loading zone. We need to stop this nonsense where we expect people with no legal background to pay attention to copyrights. We don't tell people they will go to jail for 35 years if they park in a loading zone, nor do we threaten them with prison if they routinely park in loading zones; we give them a small but annoying fine and send them on their way.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#376

Post by monsterix »

philwelch wrote: post #111
monsterix wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we not know who exactly (their faces/names etc.) were the people working in the "US Attorney Office" bent to indict him? It's easy for people to term it was not JSTOR, it was the Attorney Office but ultimately these things happen only because people forget how to treat other people properly.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. While I'll agree it was overzealous to make a federal case out of this, you can't blame federal prosecutors for doing their fucking jobs just because someone kills themselves. Many people have survived federal prosecution without dying or killing themselves. I'm shocked and horrified by this news too. It's awful that Aaron died. But it's foolish to blame anybody but him for h…

> "You can't blame federal prosecutors for doing their job?"

Since when was it their "job" to tactfully subject a civilian under stress of facing criminal law with potential 35 years of imprisonment?

Apart from above, the intent to know the people and faces behind such a bench (read DOJ) is not the same as blaming them for the part called suicide in this entire story.

We should definitely know who said what in the case, just to estimate how much weight one added into the sinking of the ship. Blaming justice system "DOJ" is like letting the real criminals getting away with it, however you may want to put it.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#377

Post by alanctgardner2 »

paraschopra wrote: post #141

It's easy to deride suicide but fact of the matter is that it is the final but a very powerful option we have at our disposal. Instead of saying that a particular person should not have committed suicide, our hope should be that if a suicide happens, it is well thought through and is not done in haste. If a particular person decides that decades of painful life is much worse than simply ending the existence, who are…

I understand what you mean, but it's the kind of logic I can only follow when I'm actually feeling suicidal. "This is a rational decision, it's not a bad thing to do, society has stigmatized it but I have a right". But (for me) a few days later, the weight just sort of lifts, and suddenly it seems like a really terrible, selfish idea again. I know it'll come back, and I dread that, but in the meantime I can't consider that it would have a been a reasonable choice. Things feel very real and very logical at the time, but looking back it's hard to understand why.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#378

Post by betterunix »

tesmar2 wrote: post #373
betterunix wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone with access to a university network has access to those documents. I have access to JSTOR also. What moral issue can you possibly raise with someone using their access to download these documents? It's OK to download 10, but not 1000000? Do you have a moral issue with automated downloads -- and if so, how can you justify JSTOR itself? It is worth noting that JSTOR did not want to press charges in this case. Af…

> Anyone with access to a university network has access to those documents The JSTOR site says "Libraries and organizations license full-text content for their patrons, and if you are affiliated with one of these institutions, you can access those complete articles." Their site seems to say anyone with a uni affiliation.

Or anyone who is a patron of a university library system, which in this day and age means anyone who has been given access to a university network. Where I am, anyone can get one-week access if someone who is affiliated signs in and generates a unique token for the guest; we frequently do this when researchers from other schools or companies visit my group, but there is no actual restriction on who can be given access. Most universities have a system for allowing members of the public to access their library system, and by extension, JSTOR.

Really, it is not much different from walking into a university library and reading the books there. Most of the schools I see allow anyone to walk into their library, without having to prove they have any sort of affiliation.

It is as though universities believe their purpose is to spread knowledge or something crazy like that...

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#379

Post by jacques_chester »

uptown wrote: post #346
misnome wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the first sensible advice I've read in this thread. I'm slightly disgusted by the sheer quantity of comments on how suicide can be "right" and how he was "pushed into it". Suicide is never, never the answer, it can just seem like it sometimes when you are very, very low.

"Suicide is never, never the answer, it can just seem like it sometimes when you are very, very low." How about when someone is facing a terminal disease in constant pain with no prospect for improvement? My opinion is that someone in that condition should have that choice.

People usually call it "euthanasia" in such a case.

I think it's worth noting that depression and terminal illnesses are different cases. Euthanasia advocates emphasise the difference. See for example the legislative system that was passed in the NT in 1995:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_the_Terminally_Ill_Ac...

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