Opinion

Troubling case against Aaron Swartz ON THE DEATH OF AARON SWARTZ

This Dec. 8, 2012 photo provided by ThoughtWorks shows Aaron Swartz, in New York. Swartz, a co-founder of Reddit, hanged himself Friday, Jan. 11, 2013, in New York City. In 2011, he was charged with stealing millions of scientific journals from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in an attempt to make them freely available. He had pleaded not guilty, and his federal trial was to begin next month. (AP Photo/ThoughtWorks, Pernille Ironside) less This Dec. 8, 2012 photo provided by ThoughtWorks shows Aaron Swartz, in New York. Swartz, a co-founder of Reddit, hanged himself Friday, Jan. 11, 2013, in New York City. In 2011, he was charged with stealing ... more Photo: Pernille Ironside, Associated Press Photo: Pernille Ironside, Associated Press Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Troubling case against Aaron Swartz 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Aaron Swartz accomplished much in his young life: As co-author of the RSS specification, he brought order to our blog subscriptions, and as an early member of the team that built Reddit, he created one of the largest communities on the Internet.

After his tragic death - he took his own life Friday at age 26 - it would behoove the rest of the country to consider what the federal case against him was meant to accomplish and why we're unable to balance the principle of public access to information with our increasingly byzantine system of copyright law and prosecution.

At the time of his death, Swartz was facing a federal trial on hacking charges that could have put him behind bars for decades. In 2010, Swartz allegedly broke into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Internet network in order to illegally download thousands of articles from the database of JSTOR, an organization that sells access to academic papers.

Those were illegal actions, and punishment certainly seems appropriate for them. But Swartz was facing 35 years - longer than federal charges for manslaughter, bank robbery or many other acts of violence - a wildly disproportionate punishment for the crime. Far more appropriate would have been for MIT and the federal government to handle the case with civil claims, as JSTOR chose to pursue (and settle) against Swartz. Federal prosecutors dropped the charges Monday, but it's too little and much too late.

The Department of Justice needs to rethink the way that it's handling these kinds of prosecutions. Before issuing another set of draconian charges against another Internet activist, it needs to consider: Who, or what, is really being protected with charges like these? Where is the public's interest?

Meanwhile, Internet activists, who believe in as much public access to information as possible, will need to learn respect for copyright law, which for all its flaws is rooted in the principle of intellectual property.

This is a balance that we will have to find as a country, but there was no reason for a case like the one against Swartz to have gone forward.