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This constitutes punctum books's finalized and revised Open Letter to The New Press and Verso Books (UK), relative to their recent compilations (in print and e-book form) of Aaron Swartz's selective collected writings, "The Boy Who Could Change the World." In our cover letter to both presses, we wrote the following, "Please find attached here a Petition, with signatures, in which we, the directors of punctum books (a not-for-profit Open Access academic press), along with the signatories, are asking for clarification (among other actions) relative to your multiple editions (in print and digital formats) of Aaron Swartz's collected writings, "The Boy Who Could Change the World," vis-a-vis your various assertions of "exclusive" copyrights as well as of the moral rights of the author, Verso's watermarking of their e-book edition, and The New Press's issuance of a DMCA "takedown notice" to Discovery Publisher in August 2015. Please know that we are sending you this letter in a spirit of goodwill: we do not assume any bad faith motives on the part of either the publishers (The New Press and Verso Books UK) or Aaron's "virtual executor" Sean Palmer (and we believe that Sean may also be seeking clarification from you on these matters, and we support him in that endeavor). Quite simply, we are seeking answers to some questions and also asking that you remedy the damage you may have caused to Aaron's legacy, if even unwittingly and with all good intentions and while possibly operating perfectly within the proper boundaries of current copyright law. Nevertheless, we believe there have been missteps along the way, and as activist-publishers whose work and lives have been dedicated for the past 5 years to fostering the Creative Commons that Aaron helped to usher into being, we seek your ears, and hopefully, your open minds. See also the story relative to our campaign at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/25/critics-protest-handling-rights-hacktivist-aaron-swartzs-writings
This letter is written to publicly call upon and to also condemn Verso and The New Press for profiting from the posthumously published writings of Aaron Swartz (book title: "The Boy Who Could Change the World"), who, in the course of a life cut tragically short by his own suicide, was one of the fiercest and most heroic advocates we had for the Open Access and Creative Commons movements. This letter asks both publishers to work to repair the damage they have done by restricting access to Aaron's writings, both in North American and Europe, and to seek innovative solutions for recouping their expenses for the production of the print and e-book editions while also ultimately providing fully open access to this culturally valuable archive of Swartz's writings. We ask that anyone here at Academia.edu who wishes to signify solidarity with this letter to indicate so in the comments section here.
International Journal of Communication
"Coder," "Activist," "Hacker": Aaron Swartz in the Italian, UK, U.S., and Technology Press2017 •
Aaron Swartz has been one of the pivotal characters in the recent history of the Internet. As an American activist, programmer, hacker, and open access advocate, Swartz was involved in the launch of now established Web standards and services and has been vocal in some of the recent debates about digital rights, copyright, and free access to the Web. Beginning in 2011, Swartz was involved in a legal battle for copyright infringement, having allegedly downloaded thousands of academic papers from the JSTOR archive. In 2013, at age 26, Swartz committed suicide. This article, based on a content analysis of 272 articles, sheds light on how eight news outlets (mainstream newspapers from Italy, UK, U.S., and two online-only technology websites) portrayed Swartz over the course of a three-year time frame, from July 2011 to December 2014.
In 2013, Edward Snowden made headlines when he leaked thousands of NSA documents, revealing an extensive surveillance program in what has been called the most important moment of whistleblowing since the Pentagon Papers. Months earlier, hacker and activist Aaron Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment after being arrested for illegally downloading files from JSTOR. Each engaged in forms of digital civil disobedience, using technology to call for change, and fit under the greater umbrella concept of hacktivism. However, both fell victim to the long-lasting media bias against hacktivists, who are often not taken seriously because their actions take place online or pigeonholed into hacker communities historically tied to selfishness, criminality, or illegitimacy. In this paper, I will analyze the relationship between hacktivists and the media, and consider how both rely on and combat one another. I will evaluate several examples of media coverage of Snowden's and Swartz's stories in and around 2013, and place them in the greater context of media coverage of hacktivism. Ultimately, I argue that a focus on Snowden and Swartz as individuals, rather than on the issues they advocate for, as well as the use of biased, politicized language negatively impacted them and led to a lack of public awareness or policy change.
In this article, the author off ers a succinct overview of the story of Aaron Swartz, one of the major victims of the war surrounding so-called intellectual property. Aaron was found hanged on January 11, 2013 in his apartment in New York. A programmer and cyberactivist, he was accused by the U.S. government of infi ltrating computers for the supposed release of copyrighted academic articles and could have been sentenced to 35 years in prison. Th e text ties in with the life of Swartz the current battles for freedom of knowledge amid the stiff ening of intellectual property legislation and the shadowy activities of the copyright industry, which aim to subordinate human rights to the control of creative sources.
2016 •
Open Access (OA) is the movement to make academic research available without charge, typically via digital networks. Like many cyberlibertarian causes OA is roundly celebrated by advocates from across the political spectrum. Yet like many of those causes, OA's lack of clear grounding in an identifiable political framework means that it may well not only fail to serve the political goals of some of its supporters, and may in fact work against them. In particular, OA is difficult to reconcile with Marxist accounts of labor, and on its face appears not to advance but to actively mitigate against achievement of Marxist goals for the emancipation of labor. In part this stems from a widespread misunderstanding of Marx's own attitude toward intellectual work, which to Marx was not categorically different from other forms of labor, though was in danger of becoming so precisely through the denial of the value of the end products of intellectual work. This dynamic is particularly visible in the humanities, where OA advocacy routinely includes disparagement of academic labor, and of the value produced by that labor.
Voices - The Internet's Own Boy
Pursuing the legacy of Aaron Swartz, one tweet at a time. A screenshot-driven essay2016 •
2013 •
A short paper calling for open access in archaeology. This highlights the ethical problems of strong copyright restrictions in conventional archaeological publishing and how the Society for American Archaeology can incrementally move toward open access publishing models.
Media, Culture and Society
Mourning for a hacktivist: grieving the death of Aaron Swartz on a digital memorial2017 •
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
“Nomadic Knowledge”2015 •
Journal of Visual Culture
The Archival Multitude. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (in conversation with Tom Holert)2013 •
Animism in Art and Performance, ed. Christopher Braddock
Sound Fossils and Speaking Stones: Towards a Mineral Ontology of Contemporary Art2017 •
2014 •
Policy Studies Journal
A Founder: Aaron Wildavsky and the Study of Public Policy2010 •
Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination Case Studies of Creative Social Change
Tracking Ida: Unlocking Black Resistance and Civic Imagination through Alternate Reality Gameplay2019 •
2021 •
Colloquia Humanistica
Critical Literacy – Open Values, Imaginary Rationalities2014 •
Shadow Libraries: Access to Educational Materials in Global Higher Education
Brazil: The Copy Shop and the Cloud2018 •
2019 •
Information Development
Piracy of scientific papers in Latin America2016 •