The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)
This article carefully avoids any analysis of the reasons why MIT chose to persecute Aaron Swartz.  Here&#x27;s a quick take on the actual situation, off the top of my head:<p>&quot;The Darker Side of MIT and the Academic Publishing Industry&quot;<p>While the Internet has been hailed from its inception as a tool that would open up access to information for the whole world, the reality has not matched that expectation.  Much of the most important and useful information generated by scientists, engineers, historians and others remains hidden behind paywalls and is not accessible to the vast majority of people, regardless of whether they have access to the Internet or not.<p>The reason is that academic research - the vast majority of it financed heavily by federal science agencies, i.e. the taxpayer - remains under the control of a small group of academic publishing houses, who earn exorbitant fees for licensing access to universities and other institutions.  For example, if you want to manufacturer an antibiotic, you&#x27;d want access to the complete research record - the initial discovery of the antibiotic, the detailed production technology (found perhaps in the methods sections of papers published in the 1970s and 1980s, say), more modern biotech methods of production of said antibiotic (papers from the 1990s and 2000s), etc.<p>Given the obvious benefit to all (except the parasites collecting the fees) of providing that information to anyone with Internet access, it&#x27;s at first glance hard to understand why MIT - one of America&#x27;s leading federally-financed research institues - chose to persecute Aaron Swartz for downloading the jstor archive, instead of merely warning him not to do it again.  Clearly the MIT administration wanted to make an example of Swartz - the question is, why?<p>The most rational explanation involves the corporatization of academic research in the USA in general, which began in the 1980s with passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to exclusively license inventions created with taxpayer dollars to private entities, rather than the prior situation, in which anyone could obtain such a license.  This &#x27;public-private&#x27; partnership situation has corrupted American academics, placing the profitability of research well ahead of the accuracy and reliability of research.<p>As part of this sea change in American academia, the control of information has become more important than the prior academic norm, which was the open sharing of information (widely understood to increase the pace of scientific discovery).  Now, many corporations have simply outsourced their R&amp;D divisions to the murky public-private academic sector, utilizing financing provided by NIH or other federal agencies, while retaining control of the results of academic research (*and paying off the cooperating professors and administators by buying the academic start-up operations and giving them stocks in their larger corporations).  This can be seen today in the highly profitable COVID vaccine and treatment business, in which initial academic research (such mRNA technology) was co-opted by the private sector under said exclusive licensing agreements (and note how open-sourcing the patents globally is continually blocked by pharma sector lobbying efforts).<p>Hence, MIT - an institution which, along with the University of California, spearheaded the transition to corporate-controlled academic research, wanted to make an example of Aaron Swartz to warn other researchers that if they tried to open-source information - thereby harming corporate profit opportunities - that they would be severely punished.<p>Well, at least there&#x27;s scibhub, although their coverage is still spotty.