The Aaron Swartz Suicide, the topic on Chris Hayes show “UP” this morning on MSNBC, opened up Pandora’s Box for me. To be honest, I did not think the show was up to its usual intellectual merit. From the opening remarks that were hypercritical of government reminiscent of Tea Party rhetoric, it further degenerated into a rant against courts of laws in general. As bad as it was, it did generate some interest in the problem of recognizing differences between physical and intellectual property particularly in respect to the problem of who owns research results. Swartz downloaded massive amount of publications from a web site, some of which were research results. The Massachusetts Courts charged him with criminal activity and subsequently and tragically, he committed suicide. He was a hacker and did exactly what the court accused of doing; therefore, the question was, “Was it a crime to download data, short of credit card numbers with criminal intent and federal secrets, from the internet?”
The scientific papers he downloaded included published research results paid for my government money. Who owns the digitized version of the results (physical property) and who owns the actual results (intellectual property)? The usual copyright laws seem not to apply. Taxpayers paid for the research; therefore, the results (intellectual property) belong to the people who pay taxes. The counter argument dealt with the rights of the private journals that digitized and published the articles. Readers of the articles should pay the journal publishers for their work; after all, it cost money to produce journals and it cost money to pay the people who digitized the articles and upload them to the internet (not always the journal publishers); therefore, as Swartz sympathizers argued, the article is in the public domain, and is “free” public information. The counter argument is that the people who print, publish, and digitize the articles have to pay for their material and associated work; therefore, they own it; it is not free even if it is on the internet. Apparently, Swartz and people like him feel because it is available in a public domain and if they are clever enough to find it, like a book published 100 years ago, it belongs to who ever finds it to do with as they please. To the hacker, to down load it is not stealing . . . it is discovery. They skipped everything in between and used the argument that they pay taxes; therefore, they paid for the original research; therefore, it was their right to down load the information; and therefore, no crime was committed. What a confusing unintelligible mess.
Here is what I think. Swartz violated the laws of common decency but there is no written law for downloading the information—that is what protesters look for to attack. Therefore, the problem is with the system not with this young man although he is clearly wrong. Perhaps the solution applies to the future and rests with the handling of research scientists. If they are working with government grants, they should publish, with copyrights, their results on the internet for all people to read as National Institutes of Health grants require. In addition, if scientific journals accept their results for publication, which they will if it is good work—the journal should not publish an article without peer review, as most of them now do. Therefore, the value of the journal over the internet would not only be that the information has passed the rigors of peer review, which gives the journal a good or bad reputation as the case may be, but also makes “like” articles as to subject matter in one condensed place. Thus, journals publish and deliver them to individuals, libraries, and laboratories around the world including the redundancy of republishing them on the internet. They want money for doing this. This is what they do now. The only difference in this proposed scheme relates to research results from all government-funded research. To the uniformed, this public publishing requirement of results of government-funded research might seem to be a small thing, but it is not.
Screams and cries will arise from research scientists working in universities for two reasons; at least those that are there as teaching institutions. The first is that while they can still patent their research results obtained from government grants, as federal laws say they can, but the results are public property and must be published on the internet or in any journal they please. They must make them public at the same time, which cuts the economic value considerable. Secondly, all research, if done in a public university, is by definition done with public funding. This is the important and controversial point; if professors in a university setting do industrial funded research, the results become public information; it is not the property of the industry. For these two reasons, it will drive patentable research into private industry laboratories where it should be in the first place.
What will remain in the universities is basic research, with a rare marketable finding available to all industries (taxpayers) at the same time and makes them available free of charge—on the internet. All the industry executives have to do to obtain the information is to read the journals or look on the internet. The greatest benefit will be to the university students and eventually society. The professors that remain at the universities will be the good teachers while those who do research with the hope of becoming rich will gravitate to private industry laboratories where the industrial executives will tell them what to do with their results. Bad teachers cannot hide behind good research. Once our universities are again devoted to teaching and not to being research institutes, we could all benefit from the tragedy of Aaron Swartz.
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