Jan. 18--Three years after Aaron Swartz took his life, the legacy of the influential young advocate for Internet openness is still unfolding. But in one respect, it's already crystal clear.
Swartz, who was raised in Highland Park, believed academic research should be available for free instead of being locked behind publishers' paywalls. That conviction might have prompted him to download millions of journal articles without authorization, an action that brought a federal prosecution many believe led to his suicide.
But today, the "open access" movement Swartz promoted is stronger than ever, and some of its advances can be traced directly to him.
"It's hard to say anything good about what happened because it was a tragedy," said Corynne McSherry of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that addresses civil liberties in the digital world. "But I do think that case was important in terms of raising awareness of this problem, and keeping that awareness up. People haven't forgotten what happened."
Academic journals are the traditional depositories of new research findings, and access usually doesn't come cheap: A single publication can cost a library thousands of dollars a year, while individual articles are often priced at $25 or more.
That puts bleeding-edge knowledge beyond the reach of people unaffiliated with major universities. Justin Peters, author of the just-published biography "The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet," said Swartz's unusual education made that seem like a particular injustice.
Swartz, unhappy at North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, left after his freshman year. Though he was home-schooled and attended occasional classes at Lake Forest College, he largely directed his own learning with material he found online, Peters said.
"You can trace (his belief in open access) back to him saying, 'Being able to access information helped me become the sort of person I am, and writ large, would probably have a similar effect on the rest of the world,'" he said.
Swartz's idealism might have driven him to the caper that became his downfall. In September 2010, federal prosecutors alleged, Swartz broke into a computer wiring closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then tapped into the school's network to download millions of articles from an archive called JSTOR.
Though Swartz had posted a manifesto calling for activists to upload scientific journals to file-sharing networks, Peters said Swartz never did that with the JSTOR cache, and might not have intended to. Instead, he said, Swartz could have been planning to use the material to analyze corporate influence on scientific research.
