Computer Genius Arrested for Unauthorized Downloads of Scholarly Articles

Michael F. McElroy, Zuma Press, Newscom

Is "information" and "knowledge" on the internet ever free? Should it be, and what are the real costs to users, to people creating the information and knowledge, and to the systems that distribute it? Mores specifically, should access to specialized, valuable information and knowledge, of the kind you'd find in a scholarly journal hosted on a system like JSTOR, be free to everyone and not just subscribing institutions? If it's free, how are these journals and the people behind them stay afloat and receive adequate compensation for their efforts creating this knowledge and information? Beside all of this, if someone accesses this essentially privatized, walled-off information without permission, ostensibly for research, non-profitable purposes, should there be any penalties and if so, what should they be? If they access it to distribute it without permission and freely to others, should there be penalties and how harsh should they be?

There are only a few of the many questions raised by the case of Aaron Swartz, a young computer genius and former fellow at Harvard University's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, who, according to David Glenn's article in yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education, is being investigated for having downloaded "4.8 million scholarly papers and other files from JSTOR." What complicates this issue, which might initially appear to be ethically complex depending upon your stance on "free internet/information" and "open culture" systems, is that Swartz allegedly downloaded the files via MIT's computer system, despite having no formal or informal affiliation with that institution. Swartz, who had access to JSTOR through his Harvard post, and who was arrested on January 6 of this year and could face 35 years imprisonment if convicted, allegedly entered MIT's Building 16 last fall and directly tapped into MIT's network via a wiring closet to access the articles. So heavy were his downloads, under the name "Gary Host" (i.e., GHost), that he tripped JSTOR's download monitor, eventually leading to a number of MIT IP addresses being blocked, and then, on October 9, to JSTOR's servers crashing because of the downloads' speed and volume. JSTOR subsequently cut off MIT's entire network for an unknown amount of time, before restoring it. Neither MIT nor JSTOR is giving specifics about this aspect of the case.

Further complicating the issue is that Lawrence Lessig, a leading legal scholar, critic of restrictive intellectual property laws, advocate of "open culture," directs the Safra Center, and in 2002 had employed Swartz, then 15, to help in the programming of Lessig's Creative Commons project (used by this blog and millions of others) to simplify copyrights for online work. Glenn notes that just this April Lessig, in a speech in Switzerland, decried publishers' paywalls, and has regularly lodged critiques of the legal delimitation of intellectual property, which is to say information and knowledge. Lessig even cited JSTOR in his April talk, pointing to a tweet "from a scholar who called JSTOR 'morally offensive' for charging $20 for a six-page 1932 article from the California Historical Society Quarterly."  He is not, however, commenting on Swartz's case but other figures like Boston-based computer scientist and MIT alum Richard Stallman, one of the major proponents of Open Source systems, have rallied to Swartz's defense.

It's still unclear what Swartz, who has since quit his Harvard post, planned to do with the huge cache of files. Was he planning to use them, as some of his peers suggest, for a research database that would have benefitted from that volume of documents, and if so, would it have been reasonable or just unfeasible for him to request financial research support from Harvard and outside sources, and permission from JSTOR? Was he planning to upload the files to unauthorized online repositories--"free" libraries, as it were--of scholarly materials, or analogous filesharing systems? Or might he have been planning both the public database project, which he has undertaken in the past, and free sharing of the files? Then there is the matter with MIT, with which, as I said, Swartz has no affiliation.  Though quite open with some of its resources--such as its Open Course modules, which make available syllabi, taped class sessions, podcasts, and other material free of charge to anyone who visits its website--MIT is a élite private university which like most private institutions does not allow unauthorized access to its research and other facilities or physical plant, so is it not reasonable for it to have taken steps to investigate and then have the authorities arrest someone who had broken into not just its computer system, but its physical plant? What's baffling is that at some point the Secret Service was called into the picture. I also wonder, as some of the people cited in the article do, whether MIT officials, many of whom have exceptional computer skills, might not have investigated and addressed the situation themselves, before calling in the authorities. Or did they?  And if they did, given the nature and scope of the crime, were their actions excessive, if they were involved in contacting the Secret Service?

A month or so ago I posted a review of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget (Knopf, 2010), which is quite critical of the "free information"/"open culture" approach, which the book suggests negatively affects many people's ability to earn a living, among other things.  If nobody is willing to pay will anyone but a very few get paid?  Lanier, if I read him correctly, isn't an advocate of commercialization or mass paywalls, but contra Lessig he does worry about the effects of not having even a modest or moderate system and structure of monetization online, which would ensure compensation for intellectual work. Last December, I posted about Harvard University Librarian and historian Robert Darnton's critique of the exorbitant costs imposed by the current journal publishing system and its damaging financial effects on libraries. If a ultrarich institution like Harvard has to struggle with paying for access, and if scholars themselves are questioning the unaffordable and unsustainable system of access to knowledge in certain formats, what about others at institutions that cannot afford to pay or those without university or other private institutioanl affiliation?

As for Swartz, the young wunderkind has stated in a 2008 manifesto entitled "Guerilla Open Access," "We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world....We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks." This seems to be a hacktivist cri de coeur, a utopian perspective and approach I fully grasp and understand. It is part of the continuum that includes both Limewire and Wikileaks.  But it's a approach that puts him and many who have undertaken similar actions squarely in the crosshairs of the US and other federal governments, as well as private corporations, including publishers, and institutions that zealously seek to protect certain types of information, especially if classified or under copyrights. We know the penalties meted out against groups and individuals involved in unauthorized sharing of documents and downloading commercial music and films, but as MIT professor Chris Capozzola--who is also acting associate dean of the institute's School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences--asks, was MIT response too much, and did it the Institute's "culture of breaking down barries"?  In the end between unauthorized filesharing with the threat of severe prosecution and rigid, unaffordable paywalls, aren't there other ways to proceed?

Lanier's arguments, like Darnton's articles and book on libraries, suggest there are, and perhaps the discussions around this particular case will lead to larger and more broadly engaged public discussions and debates that lead eventually to the development and implementation of alternate systems permitting both affordable monetization and the widest possible public access to the vital forms of knowledge contained in those articles Swartz downloaded. Meanwhile, Swartz's case continues.

Book Review: Jaron Lanier, "You Are Not a Gadget"

Jaron Lanier (Wikipedia)

If I were to summarize Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), in a sentence, it might be: Freedom is more than the freedom to post your current meal on Facebook. To be fair, Lanier's book is a far more complex and nuanced reading of the contemporary digital world and social communications media than my epigram implies, but at the same time, it epitomizes at least part of his argument, which is that as computer hardware and software develop and advance, and social communications media grow ever more omnipresent, we are increasingly surrendering key aspects of our humanity, often without recognizing that we are doing so and far too often without resistance. Or, to put it another way, Lanier, one of the pioneering computer scientists of the late 20th century and a major figure in the field of virtual reality (VR), suggests that an anti-humanist perspective, which he does identifies as integral to the open culture/free internet ethos and cloud computing/hive mind approaches, has increasingly taken hold, to that extent that we are conforming ourselves to the whims of computers and computer software—and anti-humanist designs and perspectives—rather than the other way around.  We do not have to be gadgets or be unduly influenced by them, in other words.  Yet computers and social media are shaping us more so than vice versa, and Lanier, who takes frequent pains to note that he is not only not a Luddite or technophobe, but deeply embedded and implicated in the digital world's development, stresses repeatedly: this is a very serious problem.

One analogy Lanier gives for this is the development of the MIDI technology, which has revolutionized musical production over the last 30 years. It would be hard to imagine the digital music we listen to today without MIDI's foundation, yet Lanier suggests that this program, which developed based on the limitations of the piano keyboard, which is to say, a particular percussive instrument, cannot capture the auditory and sonic shadings of a violin, let alone a human voice, and it is hard to imagine the digital and digitized music that might be possible if MIDI had not become "locked in" as the dominant musical technology when it did.  The dangers of lock-in, not just in technological terms, but in social, political and economic terms, which are all intimately interlinked, underpins Lanier's larger argument. We are told constantly that Net's democratizing power is good thing, as it has opened up possibilities for far more people than ever to express themselves in ways they could not before to audiences they could not reach before. This undoubtedly is true. Lanier returns to the notion of the lock-in, however, in suggesting that as certain technologies—like Facebook, say, or Twitter or Wikipedia—become dominant, the alternative forms die off, standardizing, systematizing and normalizing certain types of expression in favor of others. The announcement earlier this year that blogging was falling off might provide an example, in that some creative bloggers had forsaken the expressive possibilities of that form for the more succinct—and standardized, and also firewall-privatized—spaces provided by Facebook, or even less text-heavy and more image-dominant blogging formats like Tumblr. Lanier, as a hortatory counterweight, presents a short list of recommendations that in one sense might serve to challenge the trends above, but at a more basic level imply a perhaps naïve, but I think necessary, spur towards a humanity that at times appears to be vanishing before our eyes.

The issue is not so much users—which is to say, consumers—as it is the people and corporations behind the cloud/free/open culture approach. Lanier offers series of cautionary thought experiments, beginning with the Turing Test, which I would boil down to our mistaken belief that computers can be human, or that we might not be able to tell the difference between the two—and MIT's Sherry Turkle, a longtime advocate of computer technology, has begun to sound warning bells of late about this very issue—and moves into related areas, invoking Franz Kafka and others, to argue that the cloud approach may appear superior to more individualistic and autonomous approaches, but history and reality suggests the converse. The cloud/hive mind, he points out, despite all its advocates' rhetoric, cannot resolve certain problems better than collective efforts led by skilled and talented individuals. Though he does not cite them, I thought immediately of countless literary works that no hive production could create (see again Kafka's "A Report to the Academy"), as well as triumphs like Andrew Wiles' solution of Fermat's Last Theorem or Grigori Perelman's brilliant proof of the Poincaré conjecture, which is not to say that computers cannot carry out calculations that it would take humans centuries to solve, but that the most powerful computers still cannot equal the human brain or human brains in concerted but structured effort. It also results, he suggests, in the sort of intellectually and philosophically muddled discourse of Wikipedia, which has become the preponderant online encyclopedia resource.

In its worst guises, Lanier argues the hive mind approach can spur or provide the conditions for the sort of anonymous contumely and cyberbullying that many critics have decried. Alongside these problems, the open culture approach taken to its extreme has resulted in the sort of piracy and demonetization of, and thus devastation of certain fields, some of which, like the music industry, have provided vital entertainment for decades, though others, like journalism, are key to our democracy and civic culture. At the same time, nostalgic reappropriation and recycling predominate over original aesthetic invention. In other words, as the open culture approach has negatively affected middle-class employment, we have increasingly rationalized theft and plagiarism, as well as artistic mediocrity, and, as we cede more information and individuality to the cloud and the corporations and wealthy, fortunate individuals who control them, we cede more social, economic and political power as well. The private has become public and privatized.

More than once Lanier describes the hardcore advocates of cloud and open culture approaches as "Maoist," which marked one of the places I most took issue with his argument. This line of argument arises out of his 2006 Edge article, "Digital Maoism," which critiqued the authority of collective wisdom and the erasure of individuality. On the one hand, he argues that a certain kind of Utopianism, though not exclusively leftist, has underpinned the conceptualizations of what we call the Internet and Web. On the other hand, however, he repeatedly discusses the role of corporations and their capacity to concentrate wealth, which is to say, capitalism, in the determining how we ultimately have come to experience the Net and Web. To Lanier the dogmatism of many key open culture advocates resembles Maoism, but as I read the almost continuous merging of the corporate and the individual, the commodification of every aspect of our lives and of our subjectivities, the reduction or transformation of our humanity into bytes geared primarily to be monetized on behalf of a very few, I think of something more along the lines of technofascism. What does it mean when corporations and the government are fused and working in cahoots to extract more and more information from us to convert it into greater powers both of surveillance and capitalization, the latter not to our individual or even collective benefit?

Lanier's fear is the old one of collectivization, whose multiple meanings he unfortunately fails to disarticulate. This leads him to push for political and economic approaches that would counter the trendlines we are now on, but it strikes me that many of these, such as Net neutrality and government support for and regulation of monetization, are progressive, rather than conservative or neoliberal. I wonder sometimes if we have gone too far, if it is ever going to be possible to, say, remonetize the net and regulate net use at a level that would make it truly affordable to everyone, prevent monopolization via cloud control by a few corporations or corporate-government entities, preserve privacy while also ending the worst aspects of anonymity, and champion the range of expressive, and most importantly, aesthetic, social and political possibilities, that the net promises. Lanier's book provides more than a few suggestions and thus marks a crucial starting point which all our government policy makers, as well as corporate net titans, should reference, and from which they should proceed.

Aaarg.org Is Dead, Long Live Capital(isms) + Danto Responds to Queries on Art + NY Times on Black Straight Women's Marriage Prospects + 77 Banks Gone Under: Did You Know That?

For five years or so, an unheralded P2P site featuring a massive intellectual trove existed, mostly under the radar, and now it's dead. Aaaarg.org was an open-source, virtual library, one of the few places online where you could find a vast array of intellectual material usually on lockdown by publishers, private institutions, anyone. (It was linked to The Public School, a truly public, free-form, anti-institutional collective, initiated by the Telic Arts Exchange in Los Angeles in 2008, that has created and offered classes, at low cost, on a variety of utterly relevant topics, by anyone, in LA and 6 other cities (Helsinki, Brussels, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Juan). The Public School is still alive.)

Organized by participants and loosely overseen by Sean Dockery, aaarg's archive included work by almost every major theorist past and present and many not so well known, and "courses" or lists (think "Posthumanism," "Queer Technologies," "Bodies and Time," etc., ), also self-organized, which people could study to learn about...well, a great number of things in the realm of the humanities and social sciences. It did encounter legal threats, from Verso, OMA Rem Koolhaas, Columbia University Press, and Macmillan, the most recent press to issue it a cease-and-desist letter, tellingly enough, not long after Macmillan had worked out a deal with Apple for the iPad. Originally it communicated via email, but that shifted to a Twitter feed that went kaput as of May 27, 2010.

My own experience with Aaarg was limited, but I do want to note one remarkable thing that happened as a result of the site: for several years now, I've been trying to reach the Italian conceptual artist Cesare Pietroiusti. I first came across his work, particular Non-functional Thoughts, while surfing through MIT's news feeds. (I'm known to do such things.) He had been a guest there back in 2004, I believe. I found the gallery that had originally published Pietroiusti's work, and contacted them, but had no luck whatsoever getting ahold of the book. So I posted on Aaarg to see if anyone knew how to acquire the book or reach Pietroiusti, because it wasn't in any library I had access to, it wasn't available on Amazon or any other online book-seller, and I didn't know anyone who could lend me a copy. Lo and behold, after posting this request several times, a certain someone replied that he would try to upload the book, but never did. And this someone wrote me some months later and said that not only would I be able to find Non-functional Thoughts online (cf. above), but that if I sent my address, I would receive more Pietroiusti materials--because it was Pietroiusti himself! I loved this; he not only did send me his work (several books, including 100 things that certainly are not art; a CD), but also two original conceptual pieces, one of which I gave out, via raffle, to my students on the last day of classes! The work requires that if you're its owner, you must give it to whoever requests it, so whom better to have it than my student artists? Perhaps this might have happened via email or this blog or Facebook or some other means, but I appreciated how things unfolded via and as a result of this peer-to-peer site.

What I keep thinking about is the how the desire for proprietary control, control in the form of copyight, of intellectual property, that these publishers are demonstrating, which I grasp rests on a particular economic viewpoint that in part does benefit the authors of some of these works, contrasts not only with the work of The Public School and similar networks, but also with the push for free access to intellectual material and capital--classes, syllabi and so forth--by a number of very wealthy and powerful private universities, including two of the leading ones in the world, the aforementioned MIT* and Stanford. As anyone who has access to iTunes knows, for example, both of these schools, which cost about $50,000 to attend as undergraduates nowadays, make a wide array of their material free (you must, however, sign up for Apple), and MIT in particular has pushed for open-sourcing its syllabi for some time. (Other institutions also make their course materials, classes, and so forth available, but nowhere to the extent of MIT and Stanford). I think that making this material available is an excellent idea, but I also realize that the economics of it, the questions of property rights (especially in this country), control and access, are fraught. While being able to watch online classes on computer science, or chemistry, or the philosophy of mind, or sexuality, gender and performance in the contemporary global context, benefits potentially millions of people who will never be able to attend Stanford, and benefits Stanford too, what about the students who are paying a premium to attend (though they do get a substantially value-added experience, including direct access to the professor, the possibility of collaborative work and face-to-face conversations with each other, classroom time, access to world-class facilities, etc.), what about the contracting nature of humanities and social sciences academe, its march towards commercialism, and the prospects for those scholars who would benefit greatly from being able to teach, with pay, these courses elsewhere? Also, I think about the complex issues of intellectual work, its status as labor and property, and its control and dissemination: who ultimately has the say on what happens to it?

Nevertheless, I mourn the (temporary?) disappearance of Aaarg, and look forward to its (phantasmal) return--in some other guise.