As soon as the Internet became a place of commerce the commercial exchange of information began to affect academic publishing. Open Access refers to online distribution of academic articles and research. Aaron Swartz was an internet activist that was heavily involved in the free-culture movement and played a significant role in advocating for a free and open internet. Open Access advocates like Swartz believed that “...access should not be contingent on an individual’s or institution’s ability to afford a subscription to a given journal or database.”1(Peters, 174) This attitude was present in all of Swartz’s Projects. Swartz actively spoke out against the centralization of power on the internet, and the clip below describes some of the concerns that were prevalent in his work.
This clip as well as the following information comes from the 2004 documentary The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz. Any quotes unless otherwise specified are from this documentary and will be given timestamps.
Swartz worked with Carl Malumund, public domain activist and founder of public.resource.org, to liberate court documents from the paywalls of PACER, a government run website that sought to give public access to documents from United States court cases. In order to access a PACER document a user had to purchase it for 10 cents per page. PACER got a lot of backlash for this as people argued this was not “public access”. In this documentary Malumud states, “People without means can’t see the law as readily as people who have that gold American Express card” and describes this as “a poll tax on justice”(30:48)2. The E-Government Act of 2002 states that the “courts may charge only to the extent necessary in order to reimburse the costs of running PACER”2 At the time PACER was making roughly 120 million dollars per year off of these documents and according to PACER’s own records running the website costs nothing near that. In protest Malamud had created a free database where people could upload PACER documents that they had already paid for so others could access them. In 2007 PACER was getting so much backlash in regards to their prices that they chose 17 libraries around the country where people could go to access their documents freely. Open government activists saw this as an opportunity to liberate documents from the PACER system. link Carl Malamud started a group called the Thumb Drive Corp that asked people to go into one of these 17 libraries and download PACER documents to be sent to him and uploaded to a database. This is when Aaron Sawrtz and Stephen Schultze, who had already been working together, reached out to Malamud with a software program that was designed to automate pacer downloads. At this time Swartz was also involved in other projects like watchdog.net that all shared a similar goal of bringing public access to the public domain. The code that Swartz and Shultze developed was able to download 760GB, 20 million pages from the site. The people at PACER had not seen a download of this size before and while it was unusual as Malamud says in this documentary, “surprising a bureaucrat isn’t illegal”(34:11)2. The downloading got the attention of the FBI who opened an investigation on Swartz. Swartz had nothing to hide and he obtained his investigation record from the FBI and posted it on his blog.
The FBI decided not to open a case because what Swartz was doing wasn't illegal3. There is also a line in this documentary where the narrator states that these downloads “uncovered massive privacy violations in the court documents, ultimately the courts were forced to change their policies as a result” (35:24)2. This could be another reason that the FBI decided to close their investigation, however I had difficulty finding sources that elaborated on these “privacy violations” or stated exactly why the FBI chose not to open a case. Regardless, I found that to be an interesting detail.
Swartz’s work also focused on access to academic research and restrictions that private academic journals imposed. Most major universities in the U.S. pay for access to sites like JSTOR that post academic research and scholarly articles online. These sites compile a wealth of human knowledge some of which date back to the Enlightenment. It is important to remember that most of the information these organizations distribute has been paid for with taxpayer money or government grants. The fees that an individual has to pay to access this information is so substantial, we can think about Carl Malmund’s comment on the PACER fees: people without means don’t have the same access as those with the “gold Amex”. As an Open Access advocate Swartz believed that this type of knowledge should not be locked up behind paywalls by for-profit corporations but should be readily available to anyone who wishes to access it. See Swartz’s Guerilla Open Access Manifesto to get a better idea of the values behind the motivations of his work. In 2010 from a computer at MIT Swartz conducted a mass-download of JSTOR documents. This download led the FBI to open a case and press charges against Swartz. While awaiting his trial Swartz died by suidice in 2013 and the charges were dropped. JSTOR now provides free access of up to 100 articles per month to anyone who signs up with an e-mail, however this development came as a response to Covid-19 and many years after the death of Aaron Swartz.4
I think Swartz’s story fits really well into the developmental trend of new media technologies that Carolyn Marvin and Brian Winston identified through their work5
. A new media technology first emerges in a stage of experimentation that is dependent upon elite resources. In the days of the ARPANET there was an experimental and open attitude towards networking, but all networking development was happening within the bounds of an elite institution and was done by either academics or corporate researchers. Carolyn Marvin suggests that the “power elites” that were funding the ARPANET's development were “bent on institutionalizing the innovation in their own interest”5 (Murphy, 29). In terms of the Internet we mostly see this between the years 1993-1995 when the it shifts into the private sector and more recently with corporate use of algorithms regulating the content that users are exposed to. Next, the technology moves into a period of invention driven by social necessities until finally a period of diffusion where social formations define their own uses for the media form and “dominant forces seek to repress any radical potential”5 (Murphy, 29). We saw this with the FBI’s suspicion towards Swartz as he worked with Malamiud to bring public access to the public domain.Swartz’s involvement with Carl Malumund and the PACER archive project demonstrates newer ways that users continued the decentralized trend of network development that was prominent in the early days of network computing. Swartz was bridging the user/producer gap by modifying how the internet worked for him and others. The difference between the user/producer distinction being challenged through Swartz’s work versus that of the days of the ARPANET is that Swartz’s work happened in the context of a private commercial Internet.
The access barriers that result from a commercially controlled network ensure that corporations can regulate how and what data gets transmitted across the network. It is important that we encourage the sharing of information and resources in order to support the trend of a decentralized open internet. Sites like Wikipedia, GitHub, and the Internet Archive, are important examples of how a communal attitude towards public access to information is supported on the Internet today.