You can keep the spirit of the lit fest going all year round by downloading the printers row at where you will find all of the chicago tribunes book content free and discounted ebooks for subscribers and the complete printers row we will leave about 10 minutes at the end of the program for a q a session, so if you have questions please sign up at the microphone to your right and ask questions at the microphone so the home viewing audience can hear the question and before we begin, please silence your phones and turn off thank you, tom. And welcome, welcome here to Jones College prep. Great to have you here. Im sure you dont mind being many this airconditioned venue in this airconditioned venue on this hot chicago day. Y. Were delighted today to welcome a son of the north shore, justin peters, correspondent for slate, formerly wrote a lot of things i read in the columbia journalism review as well whose recentlypublished book is the idealist. Its a book thats both biography and exploration of history and musings on the future. It puts in context so many of the struggles that those in the media have had with not just the media, but in the culture have had with the idea of whats free and whats valuable on the internet. Stuart brand famously said information wants to be free, less famously said information also wants to be expensive. And the tension between those two views is part of whats at the heart of what led aaronhat swartz from Highland Park, a brilliant young man who, whether you know it or not, has affected how you get information on the internet to take his own life in the middle of a dispute over intellectual property. But this book, justin, is notok just about aaron swartz. A as the subtitle says, its about the rise of free culture on the internet, and its also about the people before aaron swartz yeah. Who were grappling with it. Could you talk about some of those . Well, as we were talking before we came on stage, i didnt realize this book budget actually going to be just about aaron swartz until i started writing it. And once i started writing it, i realized, well, we know what happened to aaron. We know how his story began, how it ended. What we dont really know as much or at least what i didnt know was how did america get toh the point where Academic Research papers are considered private property. And downloading a lot of those papers without explicit permission is considered a federal crime punishable by up to 95 years in federal prison. And once i realized it, that was going to be the central question of my book. I realized i had to really go back in time to the beginnings of statutory copyright. And trace the development from there really to sort of figure out how we got to the point where aaron swartz kills himself in january 2013. So the book goes back to the development of the ambiguity Berg Guttenberg press and uses that first really Disruptive Technology as a way to sort of trace the coevolution of those notions that information wants to beof free, and it also wants to be expensive. And its usually the readers who want the information to be free. And its usually publishers and governments who want the information to remain expensive. And i stop at various sort of points throughout history and look at various representative figures who believe in one or other. One of the fascinating sentences that sticks in my mind is your, as you are surveying the peoples attitudes toward information in the internet, you say those of us, those people involved in the growth with and the building of the internet think its largely about yes, but it has always, comma, always, comma, always been about no. Talk about that idea and also about your emphasis of it. Well, i think i say that right at the beginning of the book because there is this sort of strain of utopianism that sort of animates a lot of what the sort of earliest web colonists, few if you will, thought the web was going to be, right . B its going to be this transformative medium that brings disparate people, you know, together to length from each other to learn from each other, to work on projects together, to collaborate. Weve got the ability to share information and share stories and share conversation with the click of a button. Its easier now than ever before. Theres so much less technological friction. But the development of devices that remove technological friction do not remove social friction, right . In fact, often they create more social friction. And, you know, thats really one of the main points of the book, that in every sort of new,at cos disseminative dice that comes along twice that comes along device that comes along, the guttenberg press, the offset Printing Press, radio, television, the tape recorder, the onepiece photo copier, the internet, right . There are always these social forces that react against the development of these technologies to say, well, wait a second. Right now information is more free, but we have businesses built on monetizing the technology that exists. And if these new technologies are going to imperil our existing business models, weve got to pass laws or do something to make sure that doesnt happen. Ex and you correctly laws characterize another institution that we wouldnt ordinarily think of as a technology as falling into that category, and thats the free Public Lending Library. Th that was a technology forr sharing. And interestingly, you could argue that it was the guilt tha Andrew Carnegie and others felt about policing the masses that led to the establishment of these places. Yeah, i do argue that. And i had a lot more of that in the early draft of the book, and then there are points when i was writing this where im like, well, im interested in this threepage digression on the carnegie librariesings, but theres libraries, but theres probably only four othe people who are, so i should remove it. [laughter] r yeah, one could make the case that carnegie was trying to expiate his guilt for the homestead strike and a bunch of other things by opening these lending libraries for theen benefit of the working man across america. But youre absolutely right, owen. The Public Lending Library was a technology as much as the Printing Press was, as much as the internet was. And, in fact, i draw all of these sort of comparisons between the role that the Free Public Library played in the development of america and the development of the notions that america is the sort of place where the country benefits when information is made more accessing bl to those accessible to those who can least afford it. And the development of the internet, and i think its no surprise that aaron swartz himself was a huge believer in the power of libraries, the power of material in libraries to really transform the world. Aaron swartz did not leave behind a lot of clues to the what led him to his final decision, nor although he was a very public person in many ways in his writings on the internet, a lot of the inner workings that led us there. Other than a random manifesto here and there. Did you get a sense from your research of what turned him in, turned him from this sort oforta brilliant, idiosyncratic kid ind Highland Park into this crusader on behalf of an idea . Its hard to pinpoint one sort of moment or one encounter that sort of turned him from one to the other. I mean, this is a kid who before he turned 21, he sold a company to conde nast for what wasr probably eight figures. And he didnt get partners, but this was a guy who at a very young age had achieved what, you know, millions of people, you know, are working towards and dreaming towards. And instead resting on his laurels or going to start more companies, he reacted very sort of physically against the notion that, well, im an entrepreneur now. And instead devoted the rest of his life to the doing what was probably the polar opposite of what everyone expected him to do. Y but to get back to your question, i think from his earliest days as sort of a computer prodigy in Highland Park spending his off hours on the internet communicating and collaborating with a bunch of, you know, very accomplished adults to try to build the next generation of open web, that he saw the power of the collaborative dynamic that the web could promote. Right . He saw the power of a medium that would allow a precocious, very sort of enthusiastic teenager to the be accepted to be accepted as a peer with computer scientists and law professors. And it was a world in which you were judged by the quality ofge your contributions, not your credentials that had been conferred by some hierarchical institution. And that idea that there was sort of a world that could be more inclusive to sort of contributions and ideas from alu parties, you know, really sort of stuck with him throughout his life. And wherever he ran into institutions that were the opposite of that, right . . Re high school he spent, you know, his ninth grade year at north Shore Country Day School on the north shore trying to convince his principal to basically change the way the school worked. Theres this part in the book where i say he would schedule meetings with the principal and hand this guy articles on education reform that he had xeroxed. And i just, when i learned that, i just imagined the flummoxed look that must have played over this guys face as this, youou know, small, highpitched voice, you know, kid is trying to basically tell him how to do his job better. But his proposed reforms, obviously, didnt take, so he Left High School early. He went to stanford. Again, lasted one year. Didnt like it. Left. Went to silicon valley. Sold his company to conde nast. Moved out to california to work from the offices of wired news. On his blog he wrote that his first day of work ended with him crying in the bathroom because it was so horrible. To be clear, there was nothingrr objectively horrible about his office. This was one of those offices that you read about. It probably had pingpong tables and nap pods and all the stuff that, you know, people want to have in an office. E. But for aaron it was an office, right . Where he had to make other peoples priorities his priorities. Where he had to make other peoples sun the center of his universe, and he was just not prepared to do that ever. And i think that sort ofev resistance to other people sorth of telling him what to do, or other people telling him what was best even though he could clearly see from his perspective that it wasnt best that sort of drove him throughout his life. And thats another thread in the book, is that aaron although in many ways a unique individual, wasnt necessarily [inaudible] i mean, theres a whole, you write early on about a series of lean, earnest young men and women determined to make a difference in this world of free information and trying and its culture and trying to affect their dreams for what it could be. Who are a couple of those lean, earnest individuals who stick in your mind . So noah webster was lean andn earnest when he set off on horseback from his home in connecticut in 1786 to go to every single state legislature in america to try to lobby them for, to pass copyright laws. They call webster, or i callll webster, i suppose i am them the father of copyright in america. Ri and the nickname sort of fits, because webster was perhaps the first person who was determine canned to make his determined to make his living solely by what he had written, right . So webster realized that in a World Without statutory copyright laws, there was really no way that an author who was not of means could make a living from what he wrote. So, and this was before, this was in the articles of confederation era. Hi there was no strong sort of federal government. So each state had its own copyright laws or didnt. E and webster said, well, you know, i want to write this book, and i want people to read it, and and i want to not have to, you know, work for a living and write books at candlelight, so im going to go to legislature to legislature and lobby them for copyright laws, and thats what he did. And he was very successful. And when the federal government passed the copyright act of 1790, it was very much sort of websters example that led that law to take the shape it did. So websters one of the first lean, earnest young men that we meet in the idealist. Then we can fast forward almost 200 years to a guy named michael hart who wasnt lean. [laughter] he was a very bulky guy. Probably one of the most earn people whos ever lived. Ver live michael hart was the father of the web site called project guttenberg. He was the first person to put an ebook, to create an ebook, right . To put sort of documents online. He was a student at the u of i in 1971 when in a series of sort of unexpected events, he got access to this mainframe computer in the u of is Material Sciences laboratory. And this computer was connected to a local Campus Network. And hart realized that hed been given great power, and he wanted to do something great with it. So it was july 4th, 1971. He had been to the Grocery Store earlier that day, and a patriotic checkout clerk hadot slipped a copy of the declaration of independence in his bag. D and hart had this brainstorm, he said, well, im going to type up the declaration of independence and put it on this Campus Network so that anyone who wants to access it can access it. And he did. And no one accessed it because it was 1971, and the Grocery Stores were giving away copies for free. Gr [laughter] but, it was less the outcome of what happened in effect that he done Something Like that. Hart saw the future that moment. He saw there was going to come a day with the internet is going to be the library of choice for the world and i want to spend the rest of my life typing things up and putting them online and thats what he did. Think about this, if you are not familiar with project gutenberg, which assembled early on in my professional interactions with online content in the 80s, but michael hart and others like him types the complete words of shakespeare into a computer so that they could be accessed online. He didnt scan it in pdf it ladies and gentlemen and rely on ocr on character recognition, type the entire bible. This is not a guy like the most updated version of microsoft word. Hes using word processing top software that existed in the 80s. He spent literally the 1980s typing up the king james bible. Its a very long book, but also the technology that existed for random people out there that wanted to type up books and put them online when he started typing, the only choice you had was alls. Olowercaseletter is not an option. They are all in full capitals because thats what writing online was like in the 1970s. So, the reason why going to people like webster and hearts isnt just because they are fascinating. They are and honestly there were times when i was writing this book when im thinking, you know, i could also be writing a book about michael hart. Maybe i will at some point, but the point is exactly to put schwartz in line with earnest information idealistic they can before him and to make the point that his story is not unique in the history of the world, that its very much its very best exists as a descendent of these sort of they pop up every sort of 20 or 30 years in world history. People who are determined to change the world by sharing information, determined to harangue other people into carrying caring about these matters as much as they do. And always, always, always to borrow a phrase, encountering resistance from people with other interests, many of them to carry interests. We may have people interviewing audience on cspan or here in the auditorium who dont know why aaron swarts was arrested on the charged, pursued by prosecutors and ultimately found himself in a corner of not of his own making. Maybe you could just recap what led to that events because all of this. In september, 2010, aaron swarts who at the time was working at harvard university, he was a fellow there. He walks down cambridge massachusetts to the campus of that Massachusetts Institute of technology, connect to the mit Computer Network and connects to this database called j store. Is stands for journal storage this nonprofit database that contains full digital back files of hundreds and hundreds of academic journals. Its a fantastic resource and by connecting through mits Computer System the swarts who accessed for free, so he connected to j store. He runs this Computer Program that starts downloading articles from j store rapidly. Like hundreds of articles per second, Something Like that. A very effective program, so effective it ends up crushing the j store servers when its running. The j store tech people Say Something tapping and eight cut off sources access. He comes back the next day and connect that a different ip address and they cut him off again. Doesnt end in cut him off again comes back the next month, runs of the same sort of dance and j store is like something is going on. We dont know who is downloading these articles. Its an is it an overzealous professor or student, are they overseas hackers planning to take our entire archives and sort of give them away for free online dust diminishing the value of the archives . We dont know. Luckily, the storm passes and they think whoever was doing this stuff has gone, but they didnt. What aaron do, aaron who is downloading all of these papers found a better way to do it. He found a basement in building 16 on the mit campus, a wiring closet. He jacked his computer directly into the Campus Network and he tweaked his Download Program to not overthrow j stores computers. This was in november, 2010. He was slowly draining the entire archive and he went on undetected until new years. They are like this guys back. We need to find him and stop him and they found him. They set up a camera in the closet where his computer was. They got a picture of aaron. He was covering his face with a bicycle helmet but it was a poor disguise. Two hours after he came to retrieve his computer mit police found him riding his bike in cambridge back towards his apartment. They chased him down. They chased him through a lot. They arrested him. When they found his laptop and looked at his hard drive they realized he downloaded 4. 7 million j store articles, the majority of their database. He gave it back. He gave the papers back, but that did not stop the Us Attorneys Office in boston, from prosecuting him. First they charged him with four felonies under the Computer Fraud abuse act with a maximum penalty of 35 years in prison and they were doing this as lawyers and the audience are aware in order to encourage him to sign a plea bargain to spare the government the time and expense of going to trial, but the Us Attorneys Office was adamant that swarts would have to spend some time in prison. Likewise swarts was adamant he did not want to go to prison. He didnt feel he had done anything that merited prison time. He did not think he would fare well in prison come even the most minimal security prison. The terms of the plea agreement would have put restrictions on his access to computers after he was released. This was tantamount to being blinded for a guy who lived his life online. So, he would not agree to a plea deal and the Us Attorneys Office in boston came back in september, 2012, with a superseding indictment that raised the felony charges from four to 13 the maximum amount of time in prison from 35 to 95 years and the fines from 1 million to 3 million plus. Now, he was never actually going to spend 95 years in prison or anything approaching 35. That was never going to happen, but the assistant us attorney in charge of the case made clear that if the government won the case they would ask for federal guidelines sends of about seven years in prison. J store made it clear they did not want to see swarts prosecuted. They got there property back. They did not want to see him go to jail. Mit said nothing they maintain institutional silence for the entirety of the case. Swarts is lawyers that they had a decent chance of getting a bunch of evidence excluded. They thought that his computer and hard drive had been sort of had been searched and seized without permission, so there were hopes that they would win this case, but in january, 11, 2013, for whatever reason swarts hanged himself in a apartment in crown heights, brooklyn. Thats where that part of historians story ends. s legacy continues. It just sort of goes on from there and continues today. One of the interesting, one of the many interesting things both before and after that facts , which you have already alluded to is silence of mit, which he was not attending or working for mit, but he use the access he had to the mit network to begin this and continue this process. What mit did or didnt do cause on enormous firestorm of commentary across all of academia as well as the internet community. Why was this place of Higher Learning and exploration complicit in prosecuting someone for pursuing an ideal . And the thing about mit is that the institute likes to sort of present itself in open society; right . The doors to building seven, the Main Building is never locked. Four years local drama troupes held impromptu rehearsals in mit classrooms with approval of sort of mit staff, like there are all of these sort of trappings of transparency that really sort of run through the story the institution tells about a self. But, mit is also the model capitalist university and its not a judgment on my part. Its just a statement of facts. The School Starting in 1919, made it an institutional priority to go out and seek partnerships with industry to make itself i think the word was transcendent usefulness to the industrial world and it got very good at that. In world war ii, when it started to handle a bunch of government contracts to research or technologies for the us military , it got very good at becoming a research arm for the federal government as well and in the years succeeding world war ii as the entire in tardive academic science sort of transition from a world where they were doing pure science to a world where they were getting all of these Massive Research grants from the federal government and is seeking partnerships with sort of industry and the scientists were getting more and more specialized and more and more money was coming in. Mit kept on leading the way and theres good and bad sort of things about that like part of the reason why big Research Institutes like mit are so productive is because there is all that money committing to them and the world we have is probably 40 things in this auditorium we would not have if not for on the sort of federal money, but it also makes places like mit sort of very sort of aware of whose buttering their bread. Very sort of not doing anything that might imperil their contracts or at the least give the message to industry that mit or the school not the sort of places that respect initial property rights. Mit maintain institutional science silence throughout swarts is prosecution i think this sort of state affairs is laid out is part of the reason why. Institutions like mit obviously play have played a huge role in advancing with the internet is. I mean, in my part of the world, the media world, Mit Media Lab has worked with companies in the media space bar a long time trying to help them to understand what the future looks like and so this uneasy collaboration among government and private industry and academia is in part proximate cause of the dispute over what should be free, what should be paid for, what should be protected under copyright, which is not and by the way, none of us should think that these matters of copyright law have been or are ever settled. In fact, right around the corner from the expiration of another chunk of the copyright act, i think, in 2018. 2018. The sonny bono copyright Term Extension act. The mickey mouse act for so for those of you that dont recognize the name of the bill to make that i got 20 more years , babe, acts. Thank you, you are too kind. Sonny bono was also a congressman and when he died in a skiing accident back in the late 90s, his widow assumed his spot in congress and told her colleagues that sonny believed that copyrights should be forever and the colleagues in congress with significant sort of encouraging encouragement from Walt Disney Company and other companies that were on the verge of losing their copyright on their lucrative corporate mascots decided to sort of extend this sort of copyright terms by about 20 years thus impoverishing the Public Domain. Those extensions will run out in 2018. If history is any guide i think we can expect Companies Like disney or publishers or whatever to get together and try to find a way to extend those and its not all bad they are doing that. I remember when i sort of sold this book in the first place. Sum up my publishers mentioned that, part of the reason why we are around and thriving is we are able to give you an advance to write this book is because we sell hundreds of thousands of copies of the great gatsby every year to schoolchildren and without copyright terms of extension, like they would not be able to do thats and so i guess this gets back to part of the team of the zip book, which its perhaps unsatisfying theme, but i think its true. Everything is more complicated than you think. Everything is markup located then you think. I went into writing this book very much not on aaron swarts side. Owen mentioned at the beginning here i spent many years working at the columbia journalism review for professional reporters and i was working there right around the time that the news industry started collapsing after the economic crash and of seven and 08 and on these papers were folding scum the rec. News, you know, these magazines were shrinking and disappearing and we are asking what can we do to stop this. Probably part of the reason is because no one is paying for news anymore. Dont let anyone through. All these free culture people, information wants to be free. What they are really saying is you dont deserve to have a job. So, that was the sort of standpoint i went into this with and the more i read about it, the more i thought its more complicated than that select its more collocated than that and we would be lighted for you to ask justin questions in the last few minutes here and if you have one, please, lineup over at the microphone so the viewing audience at home and in the future on the internet will be able to hear your questions. What to do you think aaron swarts, while we are waiting to see if anyone will take the bait , what do you think aaron swarts would make of the discussion that was engendered by his staff . I think he would be happy that people are discussing issues that he cares about. I think he would also want to make the point the story is not about him; right . The story had a tragic end, but the story of aaron swarts is not just the story of aaron swarts. Is the story of aaron swarts and the rise of free culture on the internet and i think a lot of the attention that has been given to the story has focused on aaron as sort of a tragic figure and thats understandable its a very tragic figure, but aaron was always more interested in systems that in necessarily individual actors and systems and the more we can sort of focus the attention paid on his story to the story that created and ultimately destroyed him i think is better. In a real way the cover of the book, which is available for purchase and for justin to sign if you like is sort of this portrait of aaron that only emerges when you look hard and the ideas are in the forefront and justins images in the background. We will be happy to take your question. My question was why was he downloading all of this information in the first place . He never actually explained why he was doing it or what he wanted it for. There are some clues that might indicate his sort of reasoning. In 2008, he put his name to a document called the guerrilla open access manifesto in which he wrote that it was sort of the unconscionable that all of the sort of useful Academic Research was confined to subscription databases and that people in the first world were able to sort of access it while researchers in the third world had to go without and that it was incumbent on people who had access to Research Databases to go into them to sort of access as much material as they could find and to spread it around to people who went without. That was what animated the governments case against him. They saw that document and they were like this is clearly what he wanted to do, lets throw the book at him. Its always more complicated. I have heard various sort of convincing sort of but, they thought he was doing it for a project profit . Notforprofit, they thought he was doing in a way that would make j storrs material much more profitable to j store, but i think just as feasible that he wanted to access this material to separate out the Public Domain documents and release those or maybe just to run some sort of giant sort of analysis on a huge dataset. Its hard to say for sure cement academic publishing is very interesting field in which professors being paid many of them by public universities are doing research on the publics dime and publishing articles better than reviewed by other professors who work for other universities and handed over to a private company to publish and charge a big subscription feet and who really owns that, the taxpayers of illinois were paying a professor who is writing a paper thats in j store and thats one of the things at the root of it. I read something that is that this sort of European Union sort of Commission Just at the end of may issue this recommendation that all publicly funded Academic Research papers sort of in europe, you know, should be made sort of free to the public upon the location and if this takes hold, if this actually comes to tax it will be transformative, like quickly revolutionary. Will restore destroy the dutch company. They will find a way. Okay. We wont worry about them. Your question. I used to work for a small Mental Health nonprofit for parents with kids with Mental Health issues and we find these articles and defend research that could a benefited from hearing more about and they had the interested interest in reading these articles, but the company with the size we were we could not afford to pay the very large fees that the company would charge to reproduce it in any form even on this small website and i have served it seems like that would have maybe a effect upon the dissemination of the scientific knowledge that can benefit communities and on, i guess, innovation and i guess research in general like moving out poured, so it just led me to wonder how you mentioned that you cover in the book a little bit about the history may be of journals not being free and being like on this page database can you give like a brief brak background on how that came to be . Yeah, just to test just 30 second version. They first came to pass around like the 1970s where this sort of increased specialization in the sciences, you know, as a result of the postwar sort of science spending boom led to the rise of all these sorts of new source of journals and whatnot. There were demand for all these journals and the price for subscribing to the journal started rising at a rate that par outpaces inflation and this has continued unabated since the 1970s and the point where today that if you ask any Academic Library and they will say one of the biggest questions is, well, how do we find room in our acquisitions budget for anything that isnt an academic journal. They spend vast amounts on some of these journals that might cost 10, 20000 a year to subscribe to, so that sort of part of the reason why these journals are so expensive today and the fact that, why are they behind sort of pay walls right now. I suppose a way to try to protect the profits that these companies have made and continue to make. I tell my students at northwestern that they will never have access to more information throughout library and they will now during their four years in evanston and they need to take advantage of the fact that northwestern at least is spending money to make this kind of research available, but that is not necessarily always true at public universities. Theres a lot of literature on this that you could profitably find. I think we have exactly one minute, so if you can ask your question and 20 seconds he has 40 seconds to answer it. Justin, aaron did very similar things with pacer. Fbi was all over him and then they bugged out. They left him alone and decided to leave him alone. Whereas, this was a very similar situation and then they went out went after him with all of the forces of hell. Was it just prosecution or why do you think they changed . Its hard to say for sure. Maybe jurisdiction or bad luck. I mean, the pacer case never made it to the Us Attorneys Office. It stayed in that investigatory stage in the j store incident moved from that phase quickly to something the us attorneys had and wants it got in the attorneys offices hands those office exist to prosecute and prosecuted it. So, we would like to thank you again for attending printers row lit fest. We want to thank justin. Here is his book for sale outside. Tom could probably direct you to the signing table. Think again for everyone attending here. The signing table is dreck outside the auditorium here. Again, we would like to thank mr. Peters on behalf of printers row lit fest and printers row lit fest appreciates all of your feedback. Thank you. [applause]