All tonight on cspan 2s booktv. [inaudible conversations] all right, welcome to thee 32nd null Chicago Tribune printers row lit fest. I want to thank our sponsors. The theme for this years festival is what is your story and we encouraging you to share your stories from the weekend on twitter, instagram and facebook, using the prlf16. You can keep the spirit of the lit fest going all year round by downloading the printers row app and you can find the premium book contents, free and discounted books and complete printers row lit fest skill. Today you get a free ebook and five dollars any lit fest merchandise. Todays program is being broadcast live on cspan 2s booktv. Well leave ten minutes for q a session so if you have any questions, please line up at the microphone to your right and ask the question in the microphone so the home viewing audience can hear the question. And before we begin, please silence your phones and turn off any camera flashes. With that, id like to welcome prefer of Digital Media strategy at the school of journalism at northwestern used, and todays interviewer, owen youngman. Thank you, tom, and welcome to welcome here to Jones College prep. Great to have you here. Im sure you dont mind being in this air conditioned venue on this hot chicago day. Were delighted today to welcome a son of the north shore, justit peters, account for slate, formerly wrote a lot of thing is read in the columbia journalism as well, whose recently published book is the idealist. Aaron swartz and the rise of free culture on the internet. A book that is 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 in the culture have had with the idea of what is free and what is valuable on the internet. Steward 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 what is at the heart of what led aaron swartz from highland park, 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 is not just about aaron swartz as the subtitle says, its about the rise of free culture on the internet also about the people before aaron swartz, who were grappling could you talk about those . As we were talking about before we came on stage i didnk realize this book about aaron swartz suns actually going to be just about aaron swartz until i started writing it, and once i started writing it i realized we know what happened to aaron. We know how his story began. We now how it ended. What we dont really know, or at least what i didnt know, how did america get to the point where Academic Research papers are considered private property and downloading a lot of those papers without permission is considered a federal crime, punishable by up to 95 years in federal prison. Once i realized that was going to be the central question of my book, i realized i had to go become in time to the beginnings of statutory copy right and trace the development from there to figure out how we got to at the point where away swartz kills himself in january 2013. To the book goes week in development hoff the Gutenberg Press and uses that first really Disruptive Technology as a way to sort of trace the coevolution of those notions that information wants to be free, and it also wants to be expensive, and its usually thea 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 points throughout history and look at various representative figures who believe in one or the 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 and the building of the internet think its largely about, yes, but it has always, come mark always, come, always, been at no. Talk about that idea and also about your emphasis of it. I say that right at the beginning of the book because there is this sort of strain of utopianism. That animates a lot of what the set of earliest web colonists exif you will are thought the web would be. A transformative medium thatat brings disparate people together to learn from each other, to work on projects together, to collaborate. We have got the ability to share information and share stories and share conversations with the click of a button. Its easier now than ever before. 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 thats really one of the main points of the book, that every sort of new device that comes along to make it easier to transfer information from one party to another, the Gutenberg Press, offset printing press, radio, television, the tape recorder, the onepiece photo copier this, internet, there are always these social forces that react against the development of these technologies. That say, wait a seconder great 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 model, have to pass laws or do something to make sure that doesnt happen. You correctly characterized another institution as that we wouldnt ordinarily think of as a technology, as falling into that category and thats the free Public Lending Library. That was a technology for sharing, and interestingly, you could argue that it was the guilt that Andrew Carnegie and others felt about fleecing theeb masses that led to the establishment of these places. Is die argue that and have a lot more of that in the early drafts of the book, then there are points i was write, im interested in this threepage digression on the carnegie libraries but theres probably only four other people who are going to read this book who are, so i should remove it. But, yeah, one could make a case that carnegie was trying to expiate his guilt for homestead strike and a bunch of other things by opening these lending libraries for the benefit of the working man across america. But youre absolutely right, owen their Public Lending Library was a technology as much as the prisoning press was, as much as internet was. 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 notion that america is this sort of place where the country benefits when information is made more accessible to those who can least afford it, and the development of the internet, and i think its no surprise that sort of aaron swartz himself was a huge believer in the power of libraries and the power of material in libraries to transform the world. Aaron swartz did not leave behind a lot of clues to what led him to his final decision, nor i mean, although he was a very public person in many ways in his writings on the internet, a lot of the inner workings than led thusother than in a random manifesto here and there, do you get did you get a sense from your research of what turned him from this brilliant idio sin thattic kid in highland park, into this crusader on behalf of an idea . Its hard to pin point one event that turned him from one to the other. S before he turned 21 he sealed company to conde naste for what was probably eight figures and he had partners but this was a guy who, at a very young age, had achieved what millions of people, working towards and dreaming towards, and anyone taste resting on his laurels, going to start more companies, he reacted physically against the notion that, well, im an entrepreneur now, and instead devoted the rest of his life to doing what was probably the polar opposite of what everyone expected him to do. But to get back to your question, i think from as early as days as computer prodigy in highland park, spending his off hours on the internet, communicating and collaborating with a bunch of very accomplished adults to build the next generation of the open web, that he saw the power of the collaborative dynamic that the web could promote. Right . Saw the power of a medium that would allow a precocious, very sort of enthusiastic teenager, 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 of your contributions, not your credentials that have been con federal 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 all parties. Really sort of stuck with him throughout his life. Whenever he ran into institutions that were the opposite of that, right . High school, he spent his ninth grade year at north Shore Country Day School on the north shore, trying to convince his principal to basically change the way at the school worked. Theres a 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 on this guys face as this small, highpitched voice kid is trying to tell him how to do his job better. But his proposed reforms didnt take so he Left High School early. He went to stanford, lasted one year. Didnt like it. Left. Went to silicon valley. Sold his company to conde naste. Moved out to california to work from the offices of wired news, on his blog help wrote his first day of work ended with him crying in the bathroom because h it was so horrible. To be clear to there was nothing objectively horrible about his office. This is one of those offices that you read about. Probably had pingpong tables and nap pods and stuff that youl people want to have in an office, but for aaron it was an office. Where he had to make other peoples priorities his priorities. He had to make other people the center of his universe and he was not prepared to do that, ever. That sort of resistance to other people sort of telling him what to do, other people telling him what was best, even though he could clearly see it wasnt best, sort of drove him throughout his life. That is another thread in thd book is that aaron, although in many ways a unique individual, was not necessarily. A series of lean earnest young men and women determined to make a difference in this world of free information and its culture and tryi mac determined to make a difference who are a couple of those lean, earnest individuals who stick in your mind . Noah webster was leading an earnest when he set off on horseback in connecticut in 1786 to go to every single state legislator in america to try toe lobby them for past copyright laws. I call webster the father of copyright in america. The nickname stuck because webster was perhaps the first person who is determined to make his living solely by what he had written. So webster realize that in a World Without statutory copyright laws there is really no way that an author who is not a means could make a living from what he wrote. This is before, this was an article of confederation area, there is no strong federal government so each state had its own copyright laws or didnt. Webster said i want to write this book and i want people to read it and i want to not havele to work for a living and write books at candlelight so i am going to go from legislator to legislator and lobbied them for copyright laws and thats what he did and then when the federa government passed the copyright act of 1790 it was very much websters example that led that law to take the shape did. Webster is one of the lien, earnest young men that we meet in the idealists. Then we can fast forward almost 200 years to michael hart, it wasnt lean, he was a very bulky guy, he is probably one of the most earnest people have ever lived. Michael hart was the father of a website and an ideal called project gutenberg. It it was the first person to put an ebook and to put documents online. He was a student at the u of i in 1971 when in a series of onyh unexpected events he got access to a mainframe computer in their science laboratory. The computer computer was connected to local Campus Network. Hart realized that he had been given great power and he wanted to do something great with it. It was july 4, 1971. He had been to the Grocery Store earlier that day in a patriotic checkout clerk slipped a copy of the declaration of independence of his bag. And he had this brainstorm and said im going to type out the declaration of independence and put it on this Campus Network so anyone whos wants to access it can access it. He did and no one accessed it because it was 1971 and 71 and the Grocery Stores were given away copies for free. It was leslie outcome of what happened than the fact that he had done Something Like that theres going to come a day when 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 that is what he did. Think about this if or talk about the content in the 80s michael hart and others like him type the complete works oft scai shakespeare so they can be accessed online, he top the entire bible. This is not the guy whos using the most updated version of microsoft word. Hes using the software that existed in the eighties. He spent most of the 80s typing up the king james bible. Its a very long a very long book, but also the technology that existed for people out there who wanted to type up books and put it online that. When he started typing, the the only choice you had was all caps. Thats right. And his books are all in full caps because that was writing online was like in the 19 seventies. The reason i going to people like webster and hart is is not just because theyre fascinating, they are and honestly there are times when i was writing this book when i was thinking i could be writing a book about michael hart, maybe i will at some point. The point is exactly to put schwartz in line with the information i idealistic before him. To make the point that his story is not unique in the history of the world that is very much exists as a descendent of the sort of figures that pop up every 20 or 30 years in world history. People who are determined to change the world by sharing information and determined to harangue other people into caring about the matters as much as they do. And always to borrow a phrase, encountering existence from people of other interests, many of them interests, we may have people in our viewing audience on cspan or in the auditorium who do not know whypr aaron swartz was arrested, charged, pursued by prosecutors and ultimately found himself in a corner of not of his own making. Maybe you could just recap whata led to the event that caused all of the. In september 2010 aaron swartz who, swartz who, at the time was working at Harvard University at the center for ethics, he was a fellow there. He walks down massachusetts to the campus of the institute of technology, and he connects to the Computer Network and connects to a database called j store, it stands for journal storage it is a nonprofit database that contains full, digital back files of hundreds of academic journals. Its a fantastic resource. By connecting by connecting through mits Computer System he could access it for free. So he connected to j store heti runs a Computer Program and starts to download articles very rapidly. Hundreds of articles per second, Something Like that. So effective that it ends up crashing the servers but when it is running the j store tech people Say Something is happening and they cut off his access he comes back the next day connects a different ip address and he gets cut off again. He he comes back the next month, runs the same sort of dance and they Say Something is going on we dont know who is downloading all the articles, it is an over jealous the professor student are they harker hackers who want to take our archive and give them away for free online thus diminishing the value of the archives, we dont know. Luckily, the storm storm passes and i think whoever was doingar, this stuff is gone. But it was aaron who is downloading these papers what he found a better better way to do it. He found a basement on the campus and it was a wiring closet. Not he jacked his computer directly into the Campus Network and he tweaked his Download Program to not overthrow the computers. This was november of 2010. He was slowly draining the entire archive. It went undetected until around new years. Then there like this guys back, we need need to find him and stop him. They found them, set up a 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 had come to retrieve his computer mit polic. Found him riding his bike up the avenue in cambridge back towards his apartment. They. They chased him down, they chased into a parking lot, they arrested him. When they found his laptop and looked at his hard drive they realized he had downloaded 4. 7 million j store articles. The majority of their database. H he gave the papers back. But that did not stop the u. S. Attorneys office in boston prosecuting him. First they charged him with four felonies under the Computer Fraud and abuse act with a maximum penalty of 35 years in prison and milliondollar in fines. The lawyers in the audience are aware that in order to encouragh him to sign a plea bargain to spare the government the time and expense of going to trial, but the u. S. Attorneys offices office was adamant that swartz would have to spend some time in prison, likewise he was adamant he did not want to go to prison. He did not feel like he had done anything that merited prisonimas time. He did not think he would fare well prison, even the most put r minimumsecuri