What Free Costs

Aaron Swartz made access to ideas a lifelong crusade. In adolescence, it drove him to become a top programmer. But as a young adult, it brought him face to face with a potential sentence of 35 years in prison on 13 counts of fraud, cybercrime and other charges after he allegedly stole a massive database of academic journals. On Jan. 11, as Swartz was months from trial and suffering from what friends say was a renewed bout of depression, his crusade came to an end when he took his life in his Brooklyn apartment. He was 26.

Despite his history of depression, friends say Swartz’s death is the result of abuse by prosecutors seeking to make an example of him. “He was an enormously sweet and generous kid,” says Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who knew and mentored him for more than 10 years. Lessig says the prosecution “became overwhelming” and “too much to bear.” The prosecutors and their supporters say they acted within their discretion and that the $58 billion in annual lost revenue from U.S. copyright violations necessitates a tough line on computer-related intellectual-property crime. Idealistic loose cannon or Robin Hood of the open Internet, Swartz has come in death to personify the debate over how much information should be freely available and how aggressively the government should punish those who “liberate” it.

Swartz showed at age 14 early skills as a programmer, helping write the code for RSS, which allows people to subscribe to online information. A year earlier, he told the Chicago Tribune that his user-generated online encyclopedia called the Info Network, which predated Wikipedia, would remain ad-free because the Internet “was based on open standards and freedom not ads.” He spent a year at Stanford University but left to found a company that merged with Reddit, the popular news and information portal.

Once he was out of college, Swartz’s activism took a political turn. In 2008 he used public libraries to download and post online nearly the entire government archive of federal-court filings, PACER, which then charged 8¢ a page. In a 2008 manifesto, Swartz said people should “take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world.”

That is essentially what Swartz was accused of doing in 2010, when he allegedly broke into an MIT wiring closet and downloaded some 4.8 million documents from JSTOR, a private, subscription-based nonprofit repository of scholarly publications. Swartz felt the articles, some of which were produced with government funding, should be available to all. After he was caught, Swartz turned over the hard drives and said he had intended to give the information away. JSTOR has since made some of its collection freely available online, but U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said after Swartz’s arrest, “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar.”

Swartz’s fight for free ideas coincided with the rise of intellectual-property theft online. From 2010 to 2011, the federal government cracked down on such thefts, part of a 64% increase in cybercrime indictments and a 71% rise in convictions. Defense attorneys complain that prosecutors coerce guilty pleas by loading on charges to increase the cost in money, time and stress for defendants. Prosecutors recently offered Swartz six months in jail if he pleaded guilty and were flexible about how and where that time would be served. His lawyers sought to reduce the charges to a series of misdemeanors, but prosecutors insisted on at least a felony charge. Swartz’s father alleged at the funeral that his son was “killed by the government.”

Swartz’s death dramatically illuminates his lifelong push to increase access to ideas and innovations that could better the world, but it is not clear whether it has advanced that cause. In tribute, supporters have encouraged the release of copyrighted materials, and hackers have attacked MIT’s network. The university is reviewing its role in the case. The government has expressed condolences and defended the prosecution.