'Sheep justice' vs cyber freedom

DIE HARD III

Herman Tiu Laurel

1/18/2012

Daily Tribune

While the battle over the Cybercrime Law rages on in the Supreme Court (SC), with Internet freedom hanging in the balance, the first global martyr for information freedom has emerged. On Jan. 11, 2013, as the world was still basking in the afterglow of New Year revelries, Aaron Swartz died by hanging in his New York apartment after two years of struggle against the US Department of Justice's persecution over his core advocacies. As to whether or not it was a suicide is still in question. Twenty-six-year-old Swartz was a prolific American computer programmer and Internet activist, co-founding Internet systems such as the Rich Site Summary or RSS (which allows users to retrieve select news updates without having to visit many sites), Reddit and Infogami, aside from joining the Harvard University Center for Ethics and co-founding Demand Progress (which campaigns against the Stop Online Piracy Act).

Over two years ago, on Jan. 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by federal authorities for systematically downloading millions of articles from Journal Storage (JSTOR)'s library of academic journals and charged with violating federal hacking laws. JSTOR's practice of compensating corporate publishers, instead of authors, out of the fees it charges for access to such works was, to Swartz, an undue limitation on public access to academic materials produced at American colleges and universities that taxpayers pay for anyway. For doing something that writer Stephen Lendman likens to merely "checking out too many library books at the same time," Swartz was charged with "unauthorized (computer) access" under the Computer and Abuse Act.

The authorities claimed Aaron intended "to distribute material on peer-to-peer networks," which was something that he never did. In July 2011, a Massachusetts grand jury indicted him and was later arraigned in a Boston District Court. With Swartz pleading not guilty to all charges, he was freed on a $100,000 unsecured bond. He faced up to 35 years in prison and a $1-million fine if convicted.

To learn more about Aaron Swartz, let's read some of his own words in his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, where he begins by saying, "Information is power… But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves…
"The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it…

"Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. 'I agree,' many say, 'But what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights. They make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them.' But there is something we can, something that's already being done: We can fight back. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world…

"Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends. But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

"There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerrilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?" What a stirring clarion call, indeed! But will the Philippine SC heed it?

Sadly, the sanctimonious "Sheep Justice" still quibbles over the alleged need "to regulate certain freedoms that have the potential to inflict harm on others, or infringe on other people's rights" while her fellow sheep justices "baa-baa" about "Internet bullying," when all the harm and bullying are being committed by the oligopolistic corporations and tyrannically corrupt politicians they cavort with!

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