26
year old Aaron Swartz was found dead in his New York apartment on
Friday January 11th, weeks before he was to go on trial for downloading
subscription-only academic papers with the intent to distribute them.
Aaron
Swartz, a hacker-activist was facing federal charges, a possible
sentence of 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine. Guess he couldn’t
take it all and so he hanged himself in his apartment in Brooklyn on Friday.
“ Aaron Swartz has been depressed about his case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through was this painful.” Susan Swartz, Aaron’s mother, posted on a hacker section of the Ycombinator Web site today.
Sample
papers Aaron Swartz attempted to set free include “John Berryman: The
Poetics of Martyrdom” and “Mapping the Niger, 1798-1832: Trust,
Testimony and ‘Ocular Demonstration’ in the Late Enlightenment.” On its
own initiative, JSTOR, which hosts the academic papers and never pressed
charges against Aaron Swartz, started offering limited free access to
its archive just this week.
Two years ago, in
January, 2011, Aaron Swartz was arrested for, essentially, setting
information free – as an animal-rights activist might liberate a zoo. In
2008, he had thrown open PACER, a subscription-only trove of federal
judicial documents. And then he had downloaded the 4.8 million articles
from JSTOR. Aaron Swartz was charged, then, with wire fraud, computer
fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and
damaging a protected computer.
Naijaurban
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