Category Archives: Takepart.com Articles

Creative Commons, Takepart.com Articles

Creative Commons Licenses Are An Elegant “Hack”

lisareinHow to Celebrate Aaron Swartz’s Legacy? Go to a Hackathon This Weekend

By Lisa Rein, Coordinator of Aaron Swartz Day, for Takepart.com

Remember to RSVP for tonight’s event if you want a spot. I’ve also printed a small amount of limited edition posters. (Many thanks to artist
Ryan Junell!) They will be given away to at least the first 150 people who arrive.

It’s been really hard to watch this story unfold over this last year. At first it seemed like perhaps Aaron’s actions had crossed some kind of legal or ethical boundry. However, now, after more than a year of careful analysis, the evidence suggests that Aaron most likely was not breaking any laws at all. He was just doing something innovative and unexpected. This is one of the main reasons we need to protect young innovators like Aaron from misguided government prosecution in the future.

I was Creative Commons’ first technical architect, a job I got upon meeting law school professor Lawrence Lessig at a conference in Washington D.C. in 2001. When I told him that I was an XML geek who’s obsessed with copyright law, he closed his laptop and said that he had a job for me. When he explained what that entailed—expressing licenses in RSS, a simple XML format usually used for news feed syndication—I said that it couldn’t be done, that it was too simple of a format and copyright law was too complex.

Aaron showed me a way to do it. I knew him from his online activity, so I was sure he was the right person to help me—even when I found out that he was only 15.

His viewpoint towards simplicity influenced our entire online model. We decided to create a simple deed, in non-legalese, saying what a license meant. (Our lawyers still created lengthy legal documents for each license, using existing copyright law, to cover all the legal protections we wished each license to afford.)

Our team created a web site where a person could answer a series of yes or no questions to pick a license. At last, our dance of simplicity was complete. With Aaron’s help, Creative Commons licenses have become a truly elegant hack.

Takepart.com Articles

Lessig’s MayDay PAC Fights Fire With Fire – 1 Day left!

We’re a little more than 2/3 of the there (shooting for $5 million by July 4 is the goal). But there’s still time!

DONATE NOW

If you’re just sitting down to this now – that’s great! Here’s a short article that will get you up to speed quickly:

Fighting Fire With Fire: Super PAC Raises Money to Reform Campaign Finance

By Isabel Weisz for Takepart.com

From the article:

Lessig’s Mayday PAC is crowdsourcing donations in an attempt to revamp the system and change the way campaigns and elections are funded.

Mayday is also dubbing itself the Internet’s Super PAC, ready to defend the Internet from “a steady stream of threats and challenges to a free and open Internet,” according to the site. Those threats include net neutrality, SOPA and PIPA, and other regulatory issues…

By Friday we’ll see if the MayDay PAC hits its $5 million goal and is on track to end all super PACs with this new super PAC.

Here’s the timeline. The goal is to raise $5 million by July 5. The MayDay PAC aims to get campaign finance reform–minded candidates elected in 2016 and then help them get fundamental reforms passed. If the MayDay PAC succeeds, it hopes to have big money and corporate influence out of politics by 2018—and we might need to rename that date America’s New Independence Day.

MayDay PAC: The PAC to end all SuperPACs

 

Takepart.com Articles

Op Ed By Noah Swartz: My Brother Aaron Changed the Internet Forever

My Brother Aaron Changed the Internet Forever

Noah Swartz is on the organizing team for this year’s Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon, which happens on November 8th, all over the world.

By Noah Swartz for Takepart.com

From the article:

So when mere months after his death Edward Snowden released his cache of internal NSA files, and we the public and the media all struggled to understand it and figure out what to do, it was hard not to miss Aaron immensely. It was a surprise of sorts seeing that I wasn’t the only one who looked to Aaron for guidance, and that I wasn’t the only one having a hard time without him. Remember when Wikipedia blacked out to protest SOPA/PIPA? A lot of people wondered why something similar didn’t happen in protest of the NSA, why something similar didn’t happen more recently in the fight for net neutrality. The answer, in large part, is because Aaron isn’t around anymore to do these things. To motivate and guide us.

In a deeply personal way Aaron lives on in me, but similarly his ideals live on in a whole crowd of organizations and people he collaborated with. Demand Progress is still running strong, with David Segal at its helm. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is still fighting for tech law reform, with Cindy Cohen as legal director and Peter Eckersley and Seth Schoen advising it on tech. The Freedom of the Press Foundation is supporting projects like SecureDrop, a tool Aaron helped develop to protect the anonymity of journalistic sources, and Fight for the Future is educating people about net neutrality.

Aaron Swartz International Hackathon website.

Reform the CFAA, Takepart.com Articles

References for Takepart.com Article About CFAA Reform

Reference Links for TakePart.com Article on the CFAA:
  “7 Things You Might Be Doing Online That Could Get You Arrested”:

1. The EFF’s Computer Fraud And Abuse Act Reform https://www.eff.org/issues/cfaa

2. Farewell to Aaron Swartz, an Extraordinary Hacker and Activist
By Peter Eckersley
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/farewell-aaron-swartz

3. Rebooting Computer Crime Law Part 1: No Prison Time For Violating Terms of Service
By Marcia Hoffman and Rainey Reitman
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/rebooting-computer-crime-law-part-1-no-prison-time-for-violating-terms-of-service

4. Aaron Swartz’s Father: My Son Was ‘Killed by the Government’
By Matthew Fleischer for TakePart.com
http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/01/16/aaron-swartzs-father-government-killed-my-son

5. The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime” By Alex Stamos
http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartzs-crime/

6. This Is the MIT Surveillance Video That Undid Aaron Swartz
By Kevin Poulsen for Wired
http://www.wired.com/2013/12/swartz-video/

7. Booking Video: Aaron Swartz Jokes, Jousts With Cops After MIT Bust
By Kevin Poulsen for Wired
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/aaron-swartz-booking-video/

8. Until Today, If You Were 17, It Could Have Been Illegal To Read Seventeen.com Under the CFAA
By Dave Maass and Kurt Opsahl and Trevor Timm
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/until-today-if-you-were-17-it-could-have-been-illegal-read-seventeencom-under-cfaa

9. Today, we save the Internet (again): fix the CFAA!
by Cory Doctorow for BoingBoing
http://boingboing.net/2013/04/08/today-we-save-the-internet-a.html

10. Swartz didn’t face prison until feds took over case, report says
By Declan McCullagh for CNET
http://www.cnet.com/news/swartz-didnt-face-prison-until-feds-took-over-case-report-says/

Reform the CFAA, Takepart.com Articles

7 Things You Might Be Doing Online That Could Get You Arrested

7 Things You Might Be Doing Online That Could Get You Arrested By Lisa Rein for TakePart.com                                                                              June 2, 2014

From the article:

For instance, in Swartz’s case, his “crime” was having a script download the journal articles rather than sitting there and downloading them one at a time himself. Yet it’s not clear that such automation even violates MIT and JSTOR’s terms of service. As computer expert Alex Stamos describes it: “[Aaron] was an intelligent young man who found a loophole that would allow him to download a lot of documents quickly. This loophole was created intentionally by MIT and JSTOR, and was codified contractually” in documents revealed during the discovery phase of the government’s case against Swartz.

This vaguely defined law with strict penalties means that an overly ambitious prosecutor can imprison someone for doing things most Internet users consider routine, allowing law enforcement to go after people for violating a contract, even when the violated party isn’t encouraging prosecution.