It’s never really possible to understand all of a person’s problems or how those problems might play into the decision to take his or her own life, but it’s a good bet that the 35-year prison sentence and $1 million fine hanging over Aaron Swartz’s head played a significant role in his choice.
“How,” John Kerry asked a committee of the US Senate (to which he himself would later be elected) in 1971, “do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
That question was among the first that came to mind last week when I heard that Swartz had hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment.
Swartz was 26 and had already lived a life packed with accomplishments, from co-authoring the RSS standard (the primary tool for syndicating web content) at 14 to founding Infogami, which later merged into the popular Reddit social site, to co-founding the Internet freedom organization Demand Progress.
The threatened prison sentence and fine emanated from his attempt to fulfill a non-profit organization’s own stated mission of “helping the academic community take full advantage of rapidly advancing information and networking technologies”: He downloaded four million scholarly articles from JSTOR via an MIT account with the intention of making them universally available via P2P technology.
For this, he was hounded to his death by US Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant US Attorneys Stephen P. Heymann and Scott L. Garland, even though JSTOR itself declined to pursue civil litigation and has subsequently made millions of those articles publicly available.
I sincerely hope that Swartz will go down in history as the last casualty of the war over “intellectual property” — a 300-year war that, or all practical purposes, ended years ago in triumph for the forces of freedom and a total rout of those who rely, for their fortunes, on the power of the state to extract rent on people’s use of their own minds and bodies.
Since England’s “Statute of Anne” in 1710, the rentiers have been fighting increasingly dubious battles to maintain and profit from the fiction of “intellectual property.” Even at a time when printing presses were rare and electronic media non-existent, enforcement was impossible. The best they could hope for was to discourage copying by “making an example” of a few of the most prominent scofflaws.
The dawn of the Internet Age was the Appomattox of the “intellectual property” wars. The equipment for copying data and channels for distribution of that data are now cheaply and globally available. They represent a nearly trivial investment in “advanced” nations, and a doable investment even in the “Third World.”
The persecutions and prosecutions of “intellectual property” scofflaws like Jammie Thomas and distribution innovators like Aaron Swartz don’t even rise to the level of rearguard actions or last-ditch measures in this war. They’re more along the lines of John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln after Lee’s surrender, or the threatened “werewolf” attacks in occupied Germany at the end of World War II. They will not and cannot affect the outcome. They’re just murderous tantrums in lieu of facing reality.
Copyright. Is. Over. And patent is on its last legs. The old media companies’ only chance of survival is to give up their failed state-created monopolies and protection rackets, and figure out how to generate profits through voluntary trade instead.
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- Thomas L. Knapp, Networking technologies, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Nation, 01/15/13
unfortunately, i don't share the triumphalism of tom's article. virtually every piece of media content you consume is being monitored. enforcing copyright is a linchpin of 21st century political economy. The obvious demonstration that the laissez faire critique of the state is correct does not mean that the State is going away…
Doesn't he mean it is 'winning' compared to the rest of the past 300 years when these monopolies were still semi-enforceable?
privacy-aside (privacy is dead), on this internet, killing one printer causes a hundred to pop up. Enforcement is not working. Not even DMCA.
My recent post Crosbie Fitch: Pay artists you like
dL,
I don't mean to say that the state is going away. I just mean that it is de facto impossible to effectively enforce copyright, and has been for some time.
Back in the day when printing presses were expensive, rare, and the only real medium for mass distribution, it was marginally doable.
Back in the day when radio and television transmission equipment was expensive and rare and the available spectra were minimal and capable of close monitoring, ditto.
The progressive introduction of new mass distribution media — mimeograph, photocopy, computer printer, and finally a networked world in which the efficient cost of reproduction and distribution of a single copy of a work of any length and in any format is damn near close to zero — has ended the era of "copyright." And the progressive introduction of new tools for small-batch manufacturing are well on their way of doing the same thing to patent.
The very most either the rentiers or their political lapdogs can hope to accomplish is small-scale "making examples of" random or high-profile copiers. For all the hype about the upcoming "six strikes" conspiracy between IP rentiers and collaborating ISPs, I believe that will fail miserably as well.
Companies like (for example) Disney can continue to blow their money on dumb political schemes to keep what they have, or they can figure out a different way to do things. One path leads to eventual insolvency. The other leads to prospective continued profitability.
No. After 1707’s Act of Union with Scotland, England never passed any laws, although many laws were written so that they only operated within England and Wales or only within Scotland. But unless they were explicitly written that way, they applied to Scotland too (and, later, to Ireland). I doubt if this one was written to be local since part of the point of union was to unify the economic area, and this measure would have needed to apply in both jurisdictions to work properly.
Tom,
I would contend that the State maximizes discretionary power, not rents. In that sense, enforcing the unenforceable is rational for the State– with the only constraint against this rational agency being democratic collective action(demonstrated time and again to be a rather futile constraint).
All "Wars on X" fail miserably in their ostensible purpose but they nonetheless persist because they rationally serve to maximize what the State is actually maximizing: arbitrary, discretionary power. The eventual (militarized) security complex that evolves from this becomes so pervasive, so intertwined with the institutions of civil society, that none of it can be be dismantled, even when it gets to the point that literally no one benefits from the regime. The degree of social control becomes so great that the problem of revolution reaches intractability even for the political classes.
This is the sort of dark pessimism that comes from de Jasay's "The State." We discard "methodological individualism" from this model. So i wouldn't really focus on how the balance sheet may drive Disney's future actions. Rather the scientific focus would be more on their intertwined relationship with "our" massive security/intelligence complex that is accountable to no one, not even to itself.
My prediction would be an endless sea of data-analytics ultimately bound by a licensing requirement to use the internet with Disney Entertainment pumping out streams of "hack the matrix" fantasies while Disney News assembles a first-class team of "sane" political opinion reinforcers to scoff at the idea of an unlicensed(and "unregulated" internet). This is 21st century political economy.
dL,
Your "dark pessimism," as you put it, seems entirely consistent with the body of your writing over at Liberale et Libertaire, so I can't say I'm surprised that your predictions differ from mine.
I wouldn't account for the difference by referencing methodological individualism, though. At some point, and I'll try to make it soon, I'll write something up about our differences of approach.
dL,
Your "dark pessimism," as you put it, seems entirely consistent with the body of your writing over at Liberale et Libertaire, so I can't say I'm surprised that your predictions differ from mine.
I wouldn't account for the difference by referencing methodological individualism, though. At some point, and I'll try to make it soon, I'll write something up about our differences of approach.
Tom,
the dark pessimism applies to the prospects of the "liberal state." With respect to libertarianism, i'm neither a pessimist nor an optimist. I'm just not a triumphalist on the matter of technology circumventing the problem of political economy.
I must say that initially I'm inclined to agree with your comment. It could just be that I see authoritarianism in a very 1984-esque sense with Victory gin, Victory coffee, etc being staples in our modern life. However, I'm hesitant to ascribe the idea that the State runs on the pursuit of arbitrary power.
Being a philosopher by training, I see the notion of power as a fairly weak sufficient condition for action – especially action on such a large scale as the State. When given the atrocities that States have and continue to commit, power itself doesn't seem to given a strong enough reason for action. The reason being is that power is fairly abstract in nature; it isn't anything that we as humans can reach out and touch. I tend to think that such abstractions must have some concrete goal. I'm inclined to say that the goal of the power exercised by the State is the accumulation/protection wealth (rents if you will) precisely because this particular notion (rents) is something that is tangible in the concrete world. In short, the State seeks to wield power over our lives to ensure the rents keep flowing to the privileged class.
The dawn of the Internet Age was the Appomattox of the “intellectual property” wars. The equipment for copying data and channels for distribution of that data are now cheaply and globally available