Aaron Swartz, former tech lead for the Internet Archive's Open Library project and founder of the progressive activist group Demand Progress, was indicted today in federal court for allegedly stealing approximately 4.8 million articles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the JSTOR journal archive.
The indictment [PDF], originally filed on July 14 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, charges that Swartz—on multiple occasions between September 24, 2010, and January 6, 2011—gained unauthorized guest-access to the MIT computer network, using a false name, in order to "download a major portion of JSTOR's archive onto his computers and computer hard drives," among other offenses. At one point, the indictment charges, Swartz hard-wired his computer into the network via a restricted wiring closet on the MIT campus.
In October 2010, the indictment charges, Swartz attempted to download such an "extraordinary volume of articles" from JSTOR, at such a rapid pace, that it brought down several JSTOR servers, leading the archive to ban all MIT network access for several days afterward.
The indictment also charges that "Swartz intended to distribute a significant portion of JSTOR's archive of digitized journal articles through one or more file-sharing sites."
The charges—which include counts of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer—could result in a penalty of up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
JSTOR "fully cooperating" JSTOR released a statement today stating, in part: "We have been subpoenaed by the United States Attorney's Office in this case and are fully cooperating," but that it "cannot comment on this case" and that the "criminal investigation and today's indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney's Office."
In the statement, JSTOR also notes that the downloaded content "did not include any personally identifying information about JSTOR users." It also states that JSTOR had "secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed."
Demand Progress director calls charges "bizarre" The activist group Demand Progress, of which Swartz is a former executive director and founder, released a statement on its blog stating, in part, "As best as we can tell, [Swartz] is being charged with allegedly downloading too many scholarly journal articles from the Web. The government contends that downloading said articles is actually felony computer hacking and should be punished with time in prison."
The statement quotes the group's current executive director, David Segal, as saying, "it's like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking out too many books from the library....We hope to soon see him cleared of these bizarre charges."
Segal also claims in the statement that JSTOR "has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they've suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute."
Demand Progress further states that Swartz had participated in downloading large numbers of articles from other sources in the past: "In conjunction with [Stanford Law School's] Shireen Barday, [Swartz] downloaded and analyzed 441,170 law review articles to determine the source of their funding; the results were published in the Stanford Law Review."
According to a Wired report, in 2008 Swartz installed code on a terminal at the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals library in Chicago, which automatically downloaded some 20 million documents from the PACER court records archive and uploaded them to an outside server.
What he did with PACER was really interesting - making public records public, demonstrating that the system in use was not serving transparency or simple access to court documents. This is ... something quite different.
Posted by Barbara Fister on July 19, 2011 07:36:44PM
@Barbara --- Is it quite different? Most of the
scientific/academic articles in JSTOR are likely the
recipients of public funding (from the state and federal
government). This certainly raises the question about whether
publicly funded research and academic inquiry should be made,
well, public.
Posted by Dave on July 20, 2011 04:29:18PM
I find the idea that JSTOR articles should be freely available on the Internet for everyone -- and some of the extremes of the Open Access movement in general -- to be very naive.
And I wonder why Swartz downloaded JSTOR articles, and not article from a database that is profit-driven, say one of the EBSCOhost databases.
It costs money to make information available, whether in print or online.
Nancy
Posted by Nancy on July 25, 2011 09:31:03PM
Who is going to pay for making them freely available for everyone on the Internet?? JSTOR does make them available, but they go to some expense to do so. Why should Aaron Swartz steal them from JSTOR and make them freely available to everyone on the Internet? He should go to the same source that JSTOR went to and then make them freely available is he is so inclined. The problem is not with making public domain material freely available on the Internet. The problem is with stealing someone else's work and taking undue advantage of their investment. If Swartz wants to scan all those public domain resources, buy the servers and other equipment and post them for everyone to freely use, then I say more power to him.
Posted by Luis on July 27, 2011 12:04:47PM
I'm sorry, but "hard-wir[ing] his computer into the network via a restricted wiring closet on the MIT campus" isn't the same as just downloading a lot of articles. If Schwartz is shown to have done this, I don't see how looking for the funding sources of research is a defense of such action.
Posted by Craig on July 28, 2011 05:56:44PM
@Dave - I think it would make sense for research results to be freely available (see my column today) but there is a significant legal difference between reposting public domain documents and copyrighted licensed documents. As for who should pay - heck, wouldn't it make sense for us to take the dollars we already invest and open it up to all?
Posted by Barbara Fister on July 28, 2011 06:03:04PM
It seems pretty simple to me that the guy committed a giant
act of theft. He should be locked away with no computer
privileges for a very long time. It's quite clearly a
monstrous theft that calls for heavy punishment. If someone
like him believes that the information should be free to
everyone, then I applaud any *legitimate* and *legal* way to
make that happen. (Small symbolic acts of civil disobedience
are OK.) If proven guilty, what should he get? Let's see 4.8
million articles times about forty bucks, that's a theft of
around $200 million. *Everybody* who steals that much should
be put away for a long, long, long sentence -- yes,
including all of those "greedy corporate" white-collar
criminals who keep getting off with short terms of soft
time!
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