![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Since you're on the internet, you have probably heard about Aaron Swartz's recent suicide. Aaron Swartz was the founder of Reddit and a Harvard fellow -- specifically a Harvard fellow at the Center for Ethics. His main focus was intellectual property law and the ways it has become dysfunctional and perhaps ominous. To bring greater attention to the issue, he downloaded a lot of pay-to-access academic journals he could read for free through the MIT library -- I mean a lot, thousands of them -- and then took them home, which was illegal, and said that he had. Cue aggressive legal prosecution under federal cybercrime law, the exact stuff he was pointing out was a problem. Only it was more aggressive than he expected; he killed himself, and a lot of his family and friends point the finger at the overzealous prosecution.
I spend a lot of time thinking about civil disobedience, just the fact of it. As a teenager, I thought pacificst protest methods were mostly ineffective, compared to guns and entrenched power, but as I get older I can see that it's more than a distaste for violence: it's straight-up practical. Armies and insurgent groups are great at knocking out a despot, or redistributing resources, but even the most sophisticated armed force is not going to make much headway on issues like tax reform, patent law, drug regulation, expanding marriage equality, or correcting uneven enforcement of laws already on the books -- the stuff we turn to government to do, which it sometimes fails at.
My ideas of what a perfect IP law would look like do not perfectly overlap with Aaron Swartz's ideas. I don't believe that all information wants to be free or that most knowledge work is done in small chunks by amateurs. At the same time, I do find it troubling that academic publishers make their money by charging exorbitantly for access to work they didn't write, select, or edit, based on research they didn't fund, often charging the very people who did write or fund the research.
This kind of thing, along with the actions of patent trolls and the never-ending extension of Disney's rights to control, for instance, songs written by long-dead people based on hundreds of years of oral tradition, begins to look more like extorsion by feudal corporations than a system to allow inventors and artists to make a living and thus continue their work. It is quickly obvious to anyone who tries to conform with the law that the current laws are absurd and dysfunctional; the people who don't notice usually don't notice because they don't realize the laws they're breaking.
However, the Aaron Swartz case has not drawn my attention to problems with IP law, as intended, but to current criminal trial processes. Before he killed himself, federal prosecutors offered Aaron Swartz a plea bargain of six months; otherwise, the case would go to trial and prosecutors would seek a maximum penalty of 35 years in prison. In other words: we agree that six months is reasonable and you're not very dangerous, but if you don't give away your right to a public trial, we will shut you up for longer than murderers.
This is sadly not unusual. 97% of cases in the US never go to trial. Some percentage of this is efficient: if I ran a red light and I know I ran a red light, there's no reason to waste everybody's time. However, a high enough percentage to be disturbing is not minor traffic cases -- it's people, even innocent people, who really ought to go through the trial process, but are scared by prosecutorial threats. In essence, most of the time -- 97% of the time -- the plea bargain process has replaced the trial. It is the trial, with lawyers and everything. But it doesn't have the legal protections of the trial.
Sounds like cheating, doesn't it, like deliberately going around the law. Even the main law that we founded our country on. Sounds that way to me, certainly.
As the Aaron Swartz case demonstrates, this is more than cruel, and more than a misguided use of our (expensive) prison system. It has a deliberate chilling effect on political speech by making civil disobedience all but impossible. Before, you sat at a segregated lunch counter, you got a year in prison -- but it was worth it, because you had a public trial and could make your case in front of the press and the other citizens, and if it was a good enough case, you could get the unjust law overturned by the legislature or a higher court. You had your chance to influence public opinion, and it didn't take money or inside connections: it just took conviction.
Now, your choice is a year in prison and no chance to make a public case -- in fact, part of the plea deal involves saying you were wrong to do the thing -- or to lose the entire rest of your life, to lose seeing your kids grow up, to get out in prison just in time to retire on no money, since you weren't making any while you were locked up and nobody is going to hire a 70-year-old convict.
We're doing this at the same time we've agreed that a senator who wants to filibuster doesn't need to actually filibuster; he can just say he might. A senator doesn't need to endure the slightest inconvenience to block a law that millions of people might want to hear debated.
Something has gone very wrong.
I spend a lot of time thinking about civil disobedience, just the fact of it. As a teenager, I thought pacificst protest methods were mostly ineffective, compared to guns and entrenched power, but as I get older I can see that it's more than a distaste for violence: it's straight-up practical. Armies and insurgent groups are great at knocking out a despot, or redistributing resources, but even the most sophisticated armed force is not going to make much headway on issues like tax reform, patent law, drug regulation, expanding marriage equality, or correcting uneven enforcement of laws already on the books -- the stuff we turn to government to do, which it sometimes fails at.
My ideas of what a perfect IP law would look like do not perfectly overlap with Aaron Swartz's ideas. I don't believe that all information wants to be free or that most knowledge work is done in small chunks by amateurs. At the same time, I do find it troubling that academic publishers make their money by charging exorbitantly for access to work they didn't write, select, or edit, based on research they didn't fund, often charging the very people who did write or fund the research.
This kind of thing, along with the actions of patent trolls and the never-ending extension of Disney's rights to control, for instance, songs written by long-dead people based on hundreds of years of oral tradition, begins to look more like extorsion by feudal corporations than a system to allow inventors and artists to make a living and thus continue their work. It is quickly obvious to anyone who tries to conform with the law that the current laws are absurd and dysfunctional; the people who don't notice usually don't notice because they don't realize the laws they're breaking.
However, the Aaron Swartz case has not drawn my attention to problems with IP law, as intended, but to current criminal trial processes. Before he killed himself, federal prosecutors offered Aaron Swartz a plea bargain of six months; otherwise, the case would go to trial and prosecutors would seek a maximum penalty of 35 years in prison. In other words: we agree that six months is reasonable and you're not very dangerous, but if you don't give away your right to a public trial, we will shut you up for longer than murderers.
This is sadly not unusual. 97% of cases in the US never go to trial. Some percentage of this is efficient: if I ran a red light and I know I ran a red light, there's no reason to waste everybody's time. However, a high enough percentage to be disturbing is not minor traffic cases -- it's people, even innocent people, who really ought to go through the trial process, but are scared by prosecutorial threats. In essence, most of the time -- 97% of the time -- the plea bargain process has replaced the trial. It is the trial, with lawyers and everything. But it doesn't have the legal protections of the trial.
Sounds like cheating, doesn't it, like deliberately going around the law. Even the main law that we founded our country on. Sounds that way to me, certainly.
As the Aaron Swartz case demonstrates, this is more than cruel, and more than a misguided use of our (expensive) prison system. It has a deliberate chilling effect on political speech by making civil disobedience all but impossible. Before, you sat at a segregated lunch counter, you got a year in prison -- but it was worth it, because you had a public trial and could make your case in front of the press and the other citizens, and if it was a good enough case, you could get the unjust law overturned by the legislature or a higher court. You had your chance to influence public opinion, and it didn't take money or inside connections: it just took conviction.
Now, your choice is a year in prison and no chance to make a public case -- in fact, part of the plea deal involves saying you were wrong to do the thing -- or to lose the entire rest of your life, to lose seeing your kids grow up, to get out in prison just in time to retire on no money, since you weren't making any while you were locked up and nobody is going to hire a 70-year-old convict.
We're doing this at the same time we've agreed that a senator who wants to filibuster doesn't need to actually filibuster; he can just say he might. A senator doesn't need to endure the slightest inconvenience to block a law that millions of people might want to hear debated.
Something has gone very wrong.
