This was a few days ago, but I had suspected there to be an English thread about him here already. I was surprised that I could only find one
in Portuguese.
While he was not a Bitcoiner, Aaron was (in my eyes) one of the strongest supporters of the
Open Access movement and a brilliant young man working on RSS, Creative Commons and Reddit as early as his young teens.
I don't think he was a full-on Bitcoiner, but his ideas coincide with Bitcoin's principles of freedom, equal rights, standing up against monopolies and against too much power in the hands of a few companies / organizations. His
website is still up and he seems to have accepted Bitcoin donations back then (1AaronhQN1sfV24364mneNmVYvyzrZrEPh).
Anyhow, here's part of his
'Guerilla Open Access Manifesto' that he wrote at age 22.
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.
In short, he got caught by MIT mass-downloading papers from the JSTOR database (usually very expensive, but free access available through that university's IP range); U.S. attorney Ortiz wanted to make an example out of him, claiming
'Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars' and was about to put him behind bars for the rest of his life, even though JSTOR didn't even want to pursue civil litigation against him.
That is what sadly led him to ultimately commit suicide.
Lost, but not forgotten! I think his message is important nowadays more than ever. 10 years have passed and data is not significantly more freely accessible as far as I can tell. We can't just put up with this system, let us continue his legacy.
