PRESS RELEASE
For Release on July 23rd, 2011
Pirate Party Denounces Arrest of 24-Year Old Aaron Swartz
Ottawa, ON - July 23 2011 - This past Tuesday, 24-year old Aaron Swartz, a co-founder of Reddit who recently sold his stake to Condé Nast, was arrested on various computer charges in the United States. The charges pivot on an accusation of downloading 4.8 million documents from the academic archive JSTOR, in violation of terms of use. Many of these documents are in the “public domain”, meaning they are no longer covered under copyright.
Swartz is a major player in the campaign for open access to information. The Pirate Party of Canada has a firm belief that information is meant to be available to the people, so that they may learn and build upon it. JSTOR, and other academic archives, are meant to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, but by limiting access and preventing the acquisition of copies of their articles, they visibly block, or atleast slow access to information. Additionally, as they are merely scanning documents, JSTOR has no copyright claim to the information Swartz has retreived. The Pirate Party of Canada calls on all interested individuals to protest this outrageous arrest, and pass on information.
The Pirate Party of Canada is a federal political party focused on thoughtful information policy reform, genuine democracy, civil liberties, and the freedom of the Internet. You can find out more online at www.pirateparty.ca .
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Media Contacts: Â Shawn Gray 1-877-850-7722 ext *120 [email protected]
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For the record, he is not a co-founder of Reddit, as has been commonly miss-reported thanks to some sloppy reporting by the NYT. Aaron had his own company, Infogami, which was bought by Reddit 6 months after Reddit was founded.
Yes, I don’t know how people keep making the Reddit mistake. And I disagree, PPC. The guy blatantly broke into the building and network. I support open information and think the way scientific journals are published it silly, but Aaron committed a crime here.
Yes Wes thats true but all the people that were called to testify against him have dropped the charges. Hacking is illegal but sometimes when it uncovers illegal activity by other parties it is worth it.