The Internets Own Boy

ikillbears · 3 Feb 2015 at 22:03

Just watched this on iPlayer : http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b051wkry/storyville-20142015-11-the-internets-own-boy

It's about Aaron Swartz, some one i didn't know much about previously. Really rather interesting especially what he was going to go to court about which seems completely ridiculous and really rather infuriating.

just wandering if any one else caught this or indeed thoughts on what happened to him

OhEsEcks · 3 Feb 2015 at 22:46

Followed him and his work for years, and his subsequent arrest and all the ******** that followed. Haven't watched the documentary yet though. He did so much great work and wanted to make the internet and peoples lives better through that work. Archaic US laws sought to make an example out of him. Potentially spend most of his adult life in the US prison system for making textbooks freely available so people can educate themselves? What a crime...

ikillbears · 3 Feb 2015 at 23:16

precisely. i never really knew anything about it. the way its presented in the doc is that all these researched journals are then scanned and put online by various companies for an extremely large some of money which as a percentage of the world people can't afford

Ol!ver · 4 Feb 2015 at 04:27

It's one of those things that those of us who live online are going to rail against, but at the end of the day what he did was illegal and he knew it was when he did it.

Was the punishment going to fit the crime? Not really. Should he have been punished for what was effectively theft? Yes he should.

But in the typical US justice system way things got silly quickly.

Been a while since I read anything about it or whatched the doc - wasn't he offered an out at the end that basically meant he was free but had to have it on his record?

OhEsEcks · 4 Feb 2015 at 05:13

Ol!ver said:
wasn't he offered an out at the end that basically meant he was free but had to have it on his record?

No. He was offered easy street of 6 months in low-sec if he admitted to a load of federal crimes. They decided to go to court which would have meant the state would have had to start explaining exactly why they went after him as hard as they did (with the risk of exposing who the puppet master was pushing to stop those texts entering public domain. The educational text book market in the US is a multi billion dollar scam. Students pay for books each year that barely differ from the previous year, books which cost hundreds of dollars, putting knowledge out of reach of most, except those that can afford it).

The government tried the same plea deal ******** with weev after the Apple / AT&T hack and he told them to go **** themselves and he'd go to trial. So he spent time in jail waiting for trial. Turned out the government tried to have the trial staged in a county where the largest data leak occurred from, ergo, not giving him a fair trial. He got off on that technicality. As far as I know not long after he got straight on a plane and is now in Lebanon since they don't have an extradition treaty with the US.

America is not a safe place for people who expose the governments dirty business (Snowden) or stand up to corporate ******** (weev) with the desire to put the power back into the hands of the people (Swartz). If you stick around you end up like Chelsea Manning or Michael Hastings.