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\f0\fs24 \cf0 [Brewster Kahle] Wow.
I learned from Aaron what living an open source life was like.
I think he really live that way.
He floated and helped others.
He gave everything away.
He really wasn't tied to an institution.
He really was not a company man in any sense.
\
\ He was really quite pure in his motivations,
and it made him incredibly effective of cutting through a lot of the stuff that most of us
deal with, an open source life.
He was able to keep his self-interests at bay, which is kind of remarkable for a lot
of us, but he was able to do it, and he was able to communicate well with an open smile
and a kind heart.
\
\ He had a way of spending time, and his energy,
on things that mattered, and he had a genius at finding things that mattered to millions
of people.
There are lots of things to work on, but the things that he worked on were incredibly effective.
\
\ We first met, I think, in 2002, at the Eldred
Supreme Court case in Washington, DC, when we drove a bookmobile across, celebrating
the public domain by giving away books that kids made, and also, then, at the Creative
Commons launch.
\
\ I really got to know Aaron when he said, "I'd
really like to help make the Open Library website with the Internet Archive, to go and
give books, and integrate books into the Internet itself."
He said, "I've got this cool technology called Infogami.
It made possible to make Reddit happen.
Let's use it again for this other thing."
\
\ It was wonderful to work with him, but it
was really unlike working with anybody else I've ever met.
You certainly couldn't tell him what to do.
He just did what was the right thing to do, and he was right, certainly, a lot more often
than I was.
\
\ We worked together in other areas when he
was a champion of open access, especially of the public domain, bringing public access
to the public domain.
Most people think that's kind of an obvious thing.
"Isn't the public thing mean that it's publicly accessible?"
Of course, all of us are like, "No."
\
\ It's sort of like there are these national
parks with moats, and walls, and guns, and turrets pointing out in case somebody might
want to come near the public domain, and Aaron didn't think this was right, and he spent
a lot of time and effort freeing these materials.
\
\ One of the first ones that we were actively
working together on was freeing government court cases, so that anybody could see this
without having to have special privilege or money, and also, to make it so you could data
mine it, and go and look at these things in a very different way.
\
\ He freed and liberated a lot of court cases
from the PACER system, and uploaded them in-bulk to the Internet Archive, so that people could
have access to these.
There are now four million documents from 800,000 cases that have been used by six million
people because of the project that Aaron Swartz and others helped start.
\
\ [applause]
\
\ It was an interesting project because it went
over many different organizations, each playing a role, and all cooperating in a very non-corporate
way.
It was a very Aaron style way of making things happen, and the idea of making court documents
and legal documents available more easily struck a chord with me, because in college,
I was trying to figure out how I was going to try to get out of the draft.
\
\ My college didn't have a legal collection,
and the only way I could try to get to legal court documents was to get an ID from my professor
and break into the Harvard Law Library to go and read court documents.
\
\ [applause]
\
\ That sucked.
It really makes no sense, and Aaron not only saw that it doesn't make sense, he decided
he was going to try to help solve this, not just for himself, but for everyone.
Then there were other public domain collections, like the Google Books collection.
\
\ Google Books was a library project to go and
digitize lots and lots of books.
A lot of them were public domain.
Google would make them available from their website, but really, really painfully.
It would make it so that if you wanted one book, you could get one book.
If you wanted 100 books, they'd turn off your IP address forever.
\
\ This is no way to have public access to the
public domain.
The Internet Archive started getting these uploads of Google Books, going faster, and
faster, and faster.
It was like, "Well, where are these coming from?"
Well, it turns out, it's Aaron.
\
\ He and a bunch of friends figured out that
they could go and get a bunch of computers to go slowly enough to just clock through
tons of Google Books and upload them to the Internet Archive.
Interestingly, Google never got upset about it.
The libraries, on the other hand, grumbled.
Anyway, they'll get over it.
\
\ [laughter]
\
\ When this started happening, we said, "OK,
what's going on?
Should we be concerned?"
"No, it's public domain.
We just made sure that we got the cataloging data right, and we linked back to Google,
so that if you're on the book, you can go back to the original page and see..."
It all worked well, but there was Aaron doing it again, bringing public access to the public
domain.
\
\ What is crushing to me is that Aaron got ensnared
by the Federal Government for doing something that the Internet Archive actively encourages
others to do for our collections, and we think all libraries should encourage, which is bulk
downloading to support data mining and other research using computers.
This is just the way the world works.
\
\ [applause]
\
\ The first step is, for a computer to read
and analyze materials, to download a set of documents.
When Aaron did this from one library, JSTOR, they strongly objected, and demanded that
MIT find and stop that user, which then led US prosecutors to pull out their worst techniques.
\
\ Did anybody stop to ask if bulk downloading
is a crime?
I say, "No."
Bulk downloading is not in itself a crime.
Let's stop this practice of discouraging bulk downloading because there are encouraging
projects that are learning amazing new things by having computers be part of the research
process.
Let's not stop this, and discourage young people from coming up with new and different
ways to make access, to learn things from our libraries.
\
\ What resulted, in this case, was tragic and
not necessary.
Really, what we want is computers to be able to read.
Aaron knew this, we were all building this, and he got ensnared anyway.
Let's let our computers read.
\
\ Because of this tragedy, JSTOR, I talked to
this morning, and the Internet Archive have agreed to meet to discuss the broad issue
of data mining and web crawling.
I hope that we really make progress.
At least there are reasons to be positive.
\
\ This assault on Aaron would disillusion, discourage,
and depress a principled young man, and if there ever was a principled young man, it
was Aaron Swartz.
We miss you, and we will carry on your important work.
\
\ [applause] }