Tomorrow's the anniversary of the SOPA blackout. A year ago this blog (all four months old at the time, ha) was one of a few thousand sites that went dark for the day, along with Wikipedia and Reddit and basically every corner of the internet I actually read. I wrote a dumb little post about it back then, mostly just linking to the EFF and telling the three people who read this thing to call their reps. It felt like a genuine win when the bills died. It felt like the internet had actually flexed a muscle it didn't know it had.
I keep thinking about that this week because Aaron Swartz died last Friday, and he was one of the people who helped build the infrastructure, literally and figuratively, for that whole fight. He co-founded Demand Progress, the group that ran a huge chunk of the anti-SOPA organizing. He was 26.
If you don't follow this stuff closely: Swartz was under federal indictment for downloading a few million academic articles from JSTOR through MIT's network, allegedly planning to release them for free. He wasn't selling them, wasn't a foreign agent, wasn't doing anything that resembles what most people picture when they hear "computer crime." The government was pushing for something like 35 years and a million dollars in fines under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law written in 1986 that treats "violated a website's terms of service" more or less the same as "broke into a bank's mainframe." His family's statement after he died said pretty plainly that they think the prosecution contributed to it.
Cory Doctorow wrote the obituary that's been going around, up on BoingBoing since Saturday, and it's worth your ten minutes more than anything I'm going to say here. He knew the guy. I didn't. I only knew him the way most of us did: as a name attached to things you used without thinking about it. He co-wrote the RSS 1.0 spec when he was fourteen. Fourteen. I still pull half my morning reading through Google Reader, which is basically running on rails he helped lay as a teenager, and I never once thought about who wrote the spec until this week.
On Tuesday, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren put out a draft of what she's calling "Aaron's Law," which would narrow the CFAA so that breaking a terms-of-service agreement isn't a federal felony anymore. I hope it goes somewhere. I'm not going to pretend I'm optimistic. This is the same Congress that took a solid decade to update anything about how the internet actually works, and CFAA reform has been "coming soon" since roughly forever. But it's the kind of thing that wouldn't even be on the table without this week happening the way it did, which is a genuinely lousy way for a law to get fixed.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's a smaller one, and it's mine: I spent four years in undergrad hitting paywalls on journal articles I needed for coursework, articles that were often paid for with public grant money in the first place, and every single time it happened I just shrugged and found a workaround or gave up on the citation. That's the normal reaction. Shrug, workaround, move on. Swartz didn't shrug, and the difference between "annoying" and "26-year-old federal indictment" turned out to be enormous, and that gap is the part that sits wrong with me. I'm not saying what he did was nothing. MIT and JSTOR get to have opinions about their own networks — but the response was so disproportionate to the actual harm that it's hard to read the outcome as anything other than the system doing exactly what it's built to do to somebody it decides to make an example of.
MIT still hasn't said much of anything publicly, which a lot of people who actually understand how a university works tell me is deliberate and lawyer-shaped. President Reif announced an internal investigation into the school's role a few days ago, so maybe there's more to come. I'm not holding my breath on that either, honestly.
Anyway. It's a weird week to be writing about phones and app updates, so I'm not going to. Tomorrow I'll probably link to the blackout post from last year, mostly for myself.