Aaron was facing more than just stress. Copyright infringement is a badass
felony in the US these days, and he was facing ~50 years in prison and
eternal bankruptcy.
I found the case fishy from the get-go; why were the secret service trying
to catch Aaron? That's not their job, that's the FBI or the police's job.
This plays into my pet theory that governments worldwide are happy to
support totalitarian copyright because it creates a crime that anyone,
watched for long enough, will commit (and most do routinely); a great way
to erase political opponents.
And Aaron *was* a political opponent to the powers that be. Those
unfamiliar with him may get a sense of why he's missed when informed that
he was a big player in the war against SOPA and PIPA, that he helped found
net-mediated real-world activism outfits like Demand Progress and Avaaz
(which helped to kill ACTA in the EU), and that he had previously made an
enemy of the FBI for helping to liberate loads of case history from PACER
into the public domain.
Aaron was an amazing guy. I'd have loved to meet him in person someday, and
won't get that chance now.
Of note to those on this list; in response to his Guerilla Open Access
Manifesto and his passing, there's a twitter hashtag doing the rounds:
#pdftribute. Loads of academics releasing their prior work into the public
domain to liberate knowledge in Aaron's memory.
On 13 January 2013 08:41, Jonathan Cline
This is very sad news. He was operating in a grey area, legal issues to prove it, however plenty of hackers do such projects - even Woz built hacker devices to work around and expose an unfair monopoly in his day (telecommunications pricing, using a blue box). Digital pay walls of information already paid for by taxpayers are a scam and the walls need to be torn down. With a little more patience and guidance I believe he could have avoided the legal issues.. others have, and profited in the meantime (youtube for example, began as an intellectual property theft site with thousands of unlicensed music videos and songs, and later bought by google, which has still skirted legal/property theft issues). There are ways to work underneath the system to change the system, it requires more patience and willingness to create better marketing (otherwise known as doublespeak: ala Bill Gates' "Of course I'm not copying the Mac's operating system, Steve, I'd never do that, I'm just building good applications"; or Zuckerberg's "Of course your privacy is safe, you're just linking to people you already know, and there are site preferences to maintain each user's privacy").
Anyways, people in general are just scared of and threatened by really smart kids. By operating in the public eye and hyping up his hacks he really was generating a lot of psychological pressure & stress.
## Jonathan Cline ## jcline@ieee.org ## Mobile: +1-805-617-0223 ########################
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