The Boy Who Could Change the World

by Aaron Swartz

  Speech by Ken Hertz [Link inexplicably goes to Xeni Jardin’s website—Ed.].

  Even if downloading did hurt sales, that doesn’t make it unethical. Libraries and video stores (neither of which pay per rental) hurt sales too. Is it unethical to use them?

  Downloading may be illegal. But 60 million people used Napster† and only 50 million voted for Bush or Gore.‡ We live in a democracy. If the people want to share files then the law should be changed to let them.

  According to the New York Times.

  According to CNN.

  And there’s a fair way to change it. A Harvard professor found that a $60/yr. charge for broadband users would make up for all lost revenues.§ The government would give it to the affected artists and, in return, make downloading legal, sparking easier-to-use systems and more shared music. The artists get more money and you get more music. What’s unethical about that?

  See Terry Fisher, Promises to Keep [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004]. “Assuming that the ISPs pass through to consumers the entire amount of the tax, that average fee would rise by $4.88 per month” (p. 31); 4.88 × 12 ≈ 59, so I say $60/yr.

  UTI Interview with Aaron Swartz

  https://archive.org/download/AaronSwartz20040123UTIInterview/Aaron-Swartz-2004-01-23-UTI-interview.html

  January 23, 2004

  Age 17

  Hey. Who are you?

  Well, I’m trying to figure that out myself, actually. Broadly, though, I’m a teenage kid who’s interested in improving the world (mostly through law, politics, and technology).

  This year, I’m going to try to update my weblog daily with interesting thoughts, program some interesting new website software, and work on some website projects that help people better understand what’s going on in American politics.

  I’m also going to try and learn more about reverse engineering, an important process that there seems to be little published information about, probably because laws like the DMCA are making more and more of it illegal (although the law itself is likely unconstitutional, the threat of losing your house or going to jail is enough to scare away most people).

  In previous years, I’ve worked on the RSS specification for syndicating websites, the RDF specification for sharing databases, and the Creative Commons specification for describing copyright licenses.

  From my experience, political discussions on the net almost never convince anyone to switch sides or rethink their position. Do you push your views to change anyone else’s or simply to state your view in it?

  Well, I’m an optimist about that. I think that most people, when faced with overwhelming facts, will come around. (I know I certainly have.) But it is definitely difficult to overcome people’s entrenched beliefs, so I feel that if I only convince people that the other side is a reasonable position to take, even if they themselves don’t take it, then I’ve been a success.

  It is sort of a quixotic task in that sense, but it’s also useful to me by helping clarify my ideas.

  When you say something particularly controversial on the web, you’ll get all sorts of people coming at you with arguments. Considering those arguments and seeing if they’re right or, if they’re wrong, why they’re wrong, has been very valuable in clarifying my beliefs (and similarly, I hope my challenges have helped other people clarify their beliefs).

  Lately, there’s been a bit of discussion on piracy, where you once chimed in saying that Nick Bradbury doesn’t have any innate right to have people pay for his software. Shouldn’t deciding whether you want people to pay for your software be up to the developers? And isn’t it a crime to download stuff that should be paid for according to a contract (the user terms) bound to the product itself, even if it “physically” isn’t stealing?

  Let’s take those in reverse order.

  First, copyright law is the law, I’m not arguing about that.

  Second, whether shrinkwrap or clickthrough contracts that come with products are actually enforceable is still undecided by the courts. Personally, I think enforcing them would be a very bad idea because no one reads those licenses and they put all sorts of absurd things in there.

  For example, you have a right guaranteed by U.S. copyright law to make a backup copy of software in case the original copy goes bad for some reason. It would be very unfair if they could take those rights away.

  When you’re forced to follow laws passed by a government of the people, that’s one thing, but when you have to follow all sorts of additional restrictions added by some unaccountable corporation, it’s quite a different situation. What if they make you promise not to say anything negative about their software, as Google almost tried to do? What if they ask for your firstborn son? No one will actually know they agreed to these provisions, because they didn’t read them—they just wanted to use the software they spent their own money to purchase—but they’ll be held accountable for violating them.

  So, that’s still a matter of controversy, but this isn’t so unreasonable. Even mainstream organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the oldest association of computing professionals, is against this idea.

  Third, as a matter of practice, I think people should pay for software when they can and should donate money to the authors of things they enjoy even when they’re not asked to.

  If you get these things over the Internet, it’s much easier for you to do that, since you don’t have to pay all the middlemen—warehouses, distributors, stores, publishers—this large infrastructure that’s been built up because of the physical nature of these goods. You may buy a computer book for $50 but the author will be lucky if they see $5 from that. So if you download the book from the author’s website and send him $10, then both you and the author will be better off.

  However (and this apparently is the controversial part), I agree with Thomas Jefferson: the government has no duty to make sure authors get paid.

  And even more importantly, I think the government shouldn’t be giving authors control over how we express ourselves. The International Olympic Committee should not be able to stop groups from calling themselves the “Gay Olympics,” Mattel should not be able to stop people from singing about “Barbie Girl” or taking pictures of “Food Chain Barbie,” and Dr. Seuss shouldn’t be able to stop people who write in his style.

  So we need to be careful in understanding that whenever we expand these intellectual monopoly laws, we inevitably take away people’s rights to express themselves.

  Even if verbatim copying is illegal, then conceivably you could be sued for quoting Martin Luther King.

  There are a range of solutions—some more dramatic, some less. But we cannot discuss any solutions if people continue to insist that authors have an innate all-encompassing moral right to control their works forever. If people believe that, then even the most reasonable of solutions will be decried as theft.

  All EULAs aside, there must be something somewhere in the law defining what is a ware and can be bought, and also what is considered “stealing” for this. If a software product qualifies as a ware, shouldn’t “stealing” according to this law be applicable to the software too?

  The law about what is stealing is very clear. Stealing is taking something away from someone so they cannot use it. There’s no way that making a copy of something is stealing under that definition.

  If you make a copy of something, you’ll be prosecuted for copyright infringement or something similar—not larceny (the legal term for stealing). Stealing, like piracy and intellectual property, is another one of those terms cooked up to make us think of intellectual works the same way we think of physical items. But the two are very different.

  You can’t just punish people because they took away a “potential sale.” Earthquakes take away potential sales, as do libraries and rental stores and negative reviews. Competitors also take away potential sales. One reason people might be buying less CDs is because they’re spending their money on DVDs. Or, as Philip Greenspun has argued, they
’re spending their time on cell phones.

  I mean, talking to your girlfriend can often be more enjoyable than listening to music, but I don’t think we need to start suing girlfriends.

  So the question then becomes what’s a reasonable form of taking away sales, and what’s an unreasonable one. And that’s a tough question, but I think we need to evaluate it by looking at what’s best for society. Some people say that getting people to stop copying, whether through threats of lawsuits or technological restraints, is the only way to get people to keep coming up with interesting things.

  First, I don’t think this is true. Look at weblogs, Homestar Runner, Red vs. Blue, Nothing So Strange, Scott McCloud, etc., etc. There’s essentially nothing to stop anyone from copying any of these, yet the authors are all making a good living off their work.

  Second, if it is true, I think we’re in real trouble, because as a simple matter of technology, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to get people to stop copying. We can almost always get around the technical measures and we can find technical ways around most of the social ones. So if we choose this option of stricter and stricter enforcement, we’re heading down a very dark path where law enforcement gets more and more heavy-handed and authoritarian, and copying goes farther and farther underground.

  At the end of that road, I think copying is going to win out, but either way, the collateral damage to our civil liberties, our computers, and our children is going to be tremendous.

  What method would you prefer more for paying creative minds? Optional donations, micropayments, some sort of flat-rate tax/fee that would go to some sort of association which would distribute it accordingly, or something completely different?

  Well, compared to that dark path, I’d prefer all of them. :-)

  However, I think that easy small donations, perhaps optional, are probably the way to go, along with making money off of ancillary things like T-shirts and CDs and DVDs. For example, Homestar Runner doesn’t charge or ask for donations but they’ve been incredibly successful through selling merchandise. Wikipedia’s raised an incredible amount of money, probably $50,000 altogether, simply from donations. So I think we should try all these ways, but I’m optimistic that if you provide something people really like, and you make it easy for them to pay you for it, that you’ll do fine.

  But if it turns out that doesn’t work, I’ve also been looking into a system called Compulsory Licensing.

  The idea is that you pay about $5 more a month on your cable modem bill in exchange for being able to download all the music and movies you want. Then you anonymously submit what you downloaded and the money gets sent to the people who made it. The submission is done all automatically by your computer, so you don’t have to do anything.

  Now there are a lot of problems with this idea, and there are lots of objections you can come up with to it (privacy! security!), but I think if we solve all of them, we may have a viable system that is a win for everyone. Authors get paid and users save money and get easier access to what they want.

  Some people don’t take you seriously because you’re a lot younger than them. What do you think causes this?

  I think there are several reasons. First, people generalize: “Well, most kids I’ve met are pretty dumb, this guy’s a kid, so he’s probably pretty dumb too.”

  Second, one of the (I think, valuable) things about kids is that they don’t really know a lot of what you can’t say. So when kids say perfectly reasonable things that you’re not really supposed to say, they just write it off as “Kids say the darnedest things!” and “He just doesn’t know better.”

  Third, and I should be clear I’m just speculating here, there might be some sort of embarrassment factor.

  But one of the great things about the Internet is how it’s helped me overcome a lot of these things—first, because your age isn’t immediately obvious every time you speak (as it is when someone looks at you), and second, because geeks seem a lot more willing to treat people based on what they can do rather than who they are.

  This isn’t unique to kids, of course. The Internet has an amazingly liberating aspect for everyone from blacks to the blind. So perhaps that’s one reason why I’m especially concerned about draconian proposals for an “Internet Driver’s License” or a crackdown on anonymity. Quite aside from the impracticality and ineffectiveness of these proposals, they could have the effect of tagging who people are, and reintroducing those indicators that the Internet has removed.

  You’ve put a tremendous amount of work in, for example, RDF and RSS 1.0 (the latter using the former). People say this is the basis of the “Semantic Web.” Could you cue us in on what they hope to achieve with this, how they will make everyone start doing something to achieve it, and what exactly it is we’ll start doing? Do you believe this is possible?

  So, uh, here’s the plan:

  1.Collect data

  2.???????

  3.PROFIT!!!

  Uh, more specifically, the idea is to get everyone sharing their vast databases of information in RDF with each other. Then we can write programs that put this data together to answer questions and take actions to make our lives easier.

  The example I always give is a smarter Google. Instead of just being able to ask “What web pages contain these words?” you can ask all sorts of real questions: “What bands that my friends like are playing around here in the next week?” It can then look at who your stated friends are, see what bands they claim to like, get their schedules, find where you are, and see if any of them match, assuming all this data is available in RDF.

  It’s a very cool idea, but like the original web, it has this chicken-and-egg problem. When Tim Berners-Lee first came up with the web, he could only show people the handful of pages he’d written, so it didn’t seem all that interesting, and it was difficult to convince people to provide information in this crazy form for free if no one was going to read it. In the same way, there’s not much information out there in RDF now, and, because of that, there aren’t a lot of people working on reading it.

  The web, of course, eventually took off somehow. This is not to say that the Semantic Web will take off, but I think that it could, and if it does, it’ll be really cool. Unfortunately, arguing over minor technical details is a lot easier than getting the thing to take off, so right now we’re doing a lot more of the former. But I guess we’re not in much of a hurry.

  You have been very open in sharing at least some personal “real life” data. How do you feel about people that don’t want to reveal too much of their identity? (If you’ve slipped some already by accident, Google remembers forever.) How would they go about protecting their own identities?

  I’m of two minds about that. On the one hand, I want to be very open about everything. On the other, I heavily defend people’s right to privacy. Of course, as you point out, keeping your privacy is hard because if you slip once, it’s out there forever.

  I’m not sure what to say to people who want to protect their privacy except be careful when you give out private information and think about where it could end up.

  When did you find your way toward the web?

  I’ve been using the web since the days of Mosaic, since I was a little kid. I still wish I had been there since Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, but I guess I was only 4 then, so it’s not all that unreasonable that I wasn’t. So that was probably ’94/’95. I think I wrote my first web page a couple years after that (’97/’98) and probably started programming database-backed websites around 1999. Actually, it must have been a little earlier, since my first db-backed website won an award in 1999. That was an interesting era.

  Tell us some things you’ve seen that made you think “This will be huge one day or another” on the web. Which turned out that way? Which ones are on their way? Which ones failed completely?

  Well, weblogs, wikis, wireless were widely well received. Database-backed websites have done well too, although I’m a little surprised there hasn’t be
en as much standardization as I thought.

  I guess I thought things like anonymous remailers and other crypto stuff would be more popular than it has, but there’s still time for that. File sharing sure came out strong, though. The Semantic Web is probably one to watch. And I think we’ll see a lot of interesting stuff with Voice over IP in the next year.

  In general, we’ll see everything move onto the Internet and, as it does, we’ll see it open up room for the little guy to compete. So newspapers moved onto the Internet, but that also gave everyone the chance to start their own newspaper. Directories moved onto the Internet, but with Google even the little guys can be in the directory. Same with encyclopedias (Wikipedia) and ads (AdSense). And, of course, at the same time, you open yourself up to easy copying of your work.

  So the same pattern has happened in a more forcible way to music, movies, television. TV companies may not like having their shows on the net, but they’re there, and stuff like Red vs. Blue is there to compete right alongside them. So, uh, if you’re a company that’s in the business of moving information around, I’d watch out. It’s one thing to say that copying music is wrong because it hurts the artists, but what will the telephone companies say when Voice over IP drives them out of business, completely legally? How will the Encyclopedia Britannica stop Wikipedia? You’re next! :-)

  One thing I’ve noticed while using open-source software or other free software is that it usually tends to have a very poor user interface. Since these guys are all out to beat Microsoft and other “bigco”s in their own game, why is no or little attention paid to the most important part of the software, the UI? UI designing standards are standards just as the other standards they embrace, right? Or is it all just laziness; to make the product work is enough?