Lawrence Lessig's interview about Aaron Swartz on Democracy Now!
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0:00 - 0:14[Start of Amy Goodman's "The War and Peace Report" on Democracy Now, Jan 14 2013. The interview with Lawrence Lessig, about Aaron Swartz's work and life, starts at 15:19 ca]
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15:19 - 15:23[Goodman] We spend today’s broadcast remembering the life and work
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15:23 - 15:28of cyber activist, computer programmer, social justice activist and writer, Aaron Swartz.
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15:28 - 15:35At the age of 14, he co-developed the Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, web protocol,
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15:35 - 15:39the key component of much of the web’s entire publishing infrastructure.
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15:39 - 15:43By the time he was 19, he had co-founded a company that would merge with Reddit,
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15:43 - 15:46now one of the world’s most popular sites.
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15:46 - 15:51He also helped develop the architecture for the Creative Commons licensing system
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15:51 - 15:54and built the online architecture for the Open Library.
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15:54 - 15:59Aaron Swartz committed suicide on Friday. He hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment.
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15:59 - 16:01He was 26 years old.
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16:01 - 16:06His death occurred just weeks before he was to go on trial for using computers at MIT
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16:06 - 16:09—that’s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—
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16:09 - 16:14to download millions of copyrighted academic articles from JSTOR,
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16:14 - 16:17a subscription database of scholarly papers.
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16:17 - 16:22JSTOR declined to press charges, but prosecutors moved the case forward.
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16:23 - 16:27Aaron Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison and a million dollars in fines
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16:27 - 16:31for allegedly violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
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16:31 - 16:36When the case first came to light, the United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts,
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16:36 - 16:37Carmen Ortiz, said, quote,
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16:37 - 16:42"Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar,
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16:42 - 16:44"and whether you take documents, data or dollars."
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16:44 - 16:51In a statement, Swartz’s family criticized federal prosecutors pursuing the case against him.
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16:51 - 16:55They said, quote, "Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy.
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16:55 - 17:01"It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.
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17:01 - 17:05"Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office
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17:05 - 17:09"and at MIT contributed to his death," they said.
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17:09 - 17:14On Sunday, MIT President Rafael Reif said the university will conduct
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17:14 - 17:18an internal investigation into the school’s role in Swartz’s death.
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17:18 - 17:22Aaron Swartz was a longtime champion of an open Internet.
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17:22 - 17:26Last year, he helped organize a grassroots movement to defeat
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17:26 - 17:32a House bill called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and a Senate bill called PIPA, the PROTECT IP Act.
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17:33 - 17:36During a speech he delivered last May in Washington D.C.,
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17:36 - 17:40he explained the challenges he saw the Internet facing.
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17:40 - 17:42[Swartz] There’s a battle going on right now,
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17:42 - 17:45a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet
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17:45 - 17:47in terms of traditional things that the law understands.
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17:48 - 17:52Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store?
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17:52 - 17:55Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend?
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17:55 - 17:59Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in
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17:59 - 18:02or a violent smashing of shop windows?
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18:03 - 18:08Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder?
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18:08 - 18:12[Goodman] Later in the broadcast, we’ll play that full speech.
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18:12 - 18:15That was Aaron Swartz speaking in May of last year.
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18:15 - 18:21Well, he took his own life on Friday. A funeral will be held in Chicago on Tuesday.
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18:21 - 18:26For more, we now go to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Harvard Kennedy School of Government
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18:26 - 18:30to speak with Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig,
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18:30 - 18:34the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard.
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18:34 - 18:38He knew Aaron for 12 years. He was a friend and mentor.
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18:38 - 18:42Lawrence Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons.
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18:42 - 18:47Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Lessig. Tell us about Aaron.
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18:50 - 18:51[Lawrence Lessig] Well, thank you.
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18:51 - 18:58Thank you, Amy, for having me here to talk about this incredible, incredible soul.
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18:58 - 19:05You know, I think the thing to remember about Aaron is that from the youngest age, from the age of 12,
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19:05 - 19:10his work has been—his work was dedicated solely
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19:10 - 19:15to making the world a better place for the ideas that he had.
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19:15 - 19:20He started with the idea that maybe we needed to make the Internet easier to share information,
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19:20 - 19:22so that’s what led to RSS.
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19:22 - 19:24And then, with Creative Commons, it was:
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19:24 - 19:29How do we license people to make the freedom to share legally protected?
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19:29 - 19:33And then, after that, it was with the public library: How do we make books available?
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19:33 - 19:39And when that wasn’t enough, he started pushing in the social activism and progressive space,
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19:39 - 19:44first with working with Stephanie Taylor and Adam Green
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19:44 - 19:47at the Progressive Change Campaign Committee,
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19:47 - 19:51and then with his own Demand Progress with David Segal.
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19:51 - 19:55In all of these areas, what he was doing was advancing ideals.
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19:55 - 19:59He was an idealist who believed we had to live up to something better,
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19:59 - 20:07and he was an incredible soul, an incredible soul who inspired millions who now weep,
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20:07 - 20:10as we’ve seen across the Internet,
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20:10 - 20:17in outrage and devastation that he would have been driven to the cliff that he stepped over.
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20:18 - 20:24[Goodman] Can you explain what the case against Aaron was?
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20:24 - 20:25Explain what happened.
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20:28 - 20:32[Lessig] Well, I have to be very careful, because when Aaron was arrested, he came to me,
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20:32 - 20:36and I—there was a period of time where I acted as his lawyer.
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20:36 - 20:41So, I know more about the case than I’m able to talk about.
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20:41 - 20:51But here’s what was alleged. Aaron was stopped as he left MIT. He had a computer in his possession,
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20:51 - 20:55which - there was a tape that indicated that he had connected the computer to a server
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20:55 - 21:03—to a closet in MIT, and the allegation was he had downloaded a significant portion of JSTOR.
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21:03 - 21:08Now, JSTOR is a nonprofit website that has been for—
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21:08 - 21:14since about 1996, has been trying to build an archive of online acc...
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21:14 - 21:18giving online access to academic journal articles, you know,
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21:18 - 21:23like the Harvard Law Review or journal articles from geography from the 1900s.
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21:23 - 21:26It’s an extraordinary library of information.
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21:26 - 21:30And the claim was Aaron had downloaded a significant portion of that.
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21:30 - 21:34And the question, the obvious question that was in everybody’s mind, was: Why?
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21:34 - 21:36What was he doing this for?
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21:36 - 21:39And so, the Cambridge police arrested Aaron.
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21:40 - 21:45JSTOR said, "We don’t want to prosecute. We don’t want to civilly prosecute.
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21:45 - 21:46We don’t want you to criminally prosecute."
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21:48 - 21:49But MIT was not as clear.
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21:49 - 21:55And the federal government—remember, at the time, there was the Bradley Manning
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21:55 - 21:56and the WikiLeaks issue going on.
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21:56 - 22:02The federal government thought it was really important to make—make an example.
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22:02 - 22:09And so, they brought this incredibly ridiculous prosecution that had multiple—
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22:09 - 22:15you know, I think it was something like more than—more than a dozen counts
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22:15 - 22:21claiming felony violations against Aaron, threatening, you know, scores of years in prison.
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22:21 - 22:25But, you know, it’s not the theoretical claims about what he might have gotten;
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22:25 - 22:29it was the practical burden that for the last two years, you know,
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22:29 - 22:35his wealth was bled dry as he had to negotiate to try to finally settle this matter,
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22:35 - 22:41because the government was not going to stop before he admitted that he was a felon,
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22:41 - 22:47which I think, you know, in a world where the architects of the financial crisis
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22:47 - 22:48dine regularly at the White House,
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22:48 - 22:52it’s ridiculous to think Aaron Swartz was a felon.
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22:53 - 22:58[Goodman] What was the scene where he was arrested? He was riding his bicycle?
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23:00 - 23:06[Lessig] Yeah. You know, this is part of the incredibly ridiculous propaganda that the government put out.
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23:06 - 23:13They released these badly taken—because it was basically just a security camera—images of Aaron
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23:13 - 23:16and suggested that what Aaron was doing was hiding his face
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23:16 - 23:20and he was trying to evade—to evade detection.
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23:20 - 23:27All he was doing was walking out of MIT with his bike helmet attached to his backpack.
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23:27 - 23:32And the image was, you know, just of the guy who had just previously been in MIT,
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23:32 - 23:33using their network, leaving.
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23:33 - 23:36Now, you know, we have to keep this in context.
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23:36 - 23:41MIT, for most of its history, has been a celebrator of open access to information.
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23:41 - 23:45Indeed, the policy of MIT, at least most people thought,
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23:45 - 23:49allowed anybody who was on the campus to have access to information on the campus.
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23:49 - 23:54MIT houses Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement,
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23:55 - 23:58who has celebrated and defended MIT many, many times for their beliefs.
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23:59 - 24:03And so, you know, a lot of people just wondered, what was MIT doing here?
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24:03 - 24:06Now, you know, I think we have to—we have to say—
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24:06 - 24:12I criticized MIT very strongly in a blog post that I posted called "Prosecutor as Bully,"
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24:13 - 24:15because of what they did before Aaron died,
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24:16 - 24:21because of their refusal to recognize the craziness of what the Federal government was doing
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24:21 - 24:25and to stop it by saying, "We don’t prosecution here, and you should stop prosecution."
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24:25 - 24:27MIT should have done that, and they didn’t.
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24:28 - 24:32But what MIT has done on Sunday, I think, is extraordinarily important.
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24:32 - 24:34By appointing Hal Abelson,
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24:34 - 24:40who I think is the best possible person in the world to look at what MIT did
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24:40 - 24:42and to report back about whether it was right or wrong,
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24:42 - 24:47I think MIT has taken an important step to acknowledge—
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24:47 - 24:50to acknowledge the wrong in what happened here.
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24:50 - 24:54And we’ll see what Hal Abelson says when he looks at it and reports back.
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24:54 - 24:56[Goodman] We’re going to go to break, and when we come back,
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24:56 - 25:00we’re going to read that statement of MIT and also the statement of JSTOR,
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25:00 - 25:03that didn’t want Aaron Swartz prosecuted,
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25:04 - 25:13the company, the nonprofit, that ran this document archive that he was downloading,
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25:13 - 25:17that ultimately is releasing it all to the public anyway.
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25:17 - 25:19And we’ll read the comments of his parents.
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25:19 - 25:26Ultimately today, we’ll play the speech that Aaron Swartz gave last year about freedom to connect.
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25:26 - 25:28This is Democracy Now! Back in a moment.
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25:28 - 25:30[break - subtitled interview starts again at 26:42]
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26:42 - 26:44[Goodman] Phil Ochs: "Another Country".
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26:44 - 26:49This is Democracy Now! democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman.
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26:49 - 26:54We are doing today’s broadcast about the suicide of Aaron Swartz,
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26:54 - 27:01a 26-year-old cyber activist, social justice activist, co-founder of Reddit.
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27:01 - 27:05He developed RSS when he was 14 years old.
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27:05 - 27:09Our guest today is Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig,
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27:09 - 27:13his mentor, his friend for many years, speaking to us from Harvard.
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27:13 - 27:14I’m Amy Godman.
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27:14 - 27:18Over the weekend, Aaron’s family released this statement. They said, quote,
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27:18 - 27:20"Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy.
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27:20 - 27:25It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.
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27:25 - 27:31Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death."
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27:33 - 27:38MIT also released a statement, and I’d like to read that here.
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27:38 - 27:41On Sunday, we reached out to MIT for comment.
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27:41 - 27:45This is part of the statement the MIT president, Rafael Reif,
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27:45 - 27:48sent to the MIT community regarding Aaron’s death. He wrote, quote,
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27:50 - 27:53"I will not attempt to summarize here the complex events of the past two years.
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27:53 - 27:58Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT.
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27:58 - 28:04I have asked Professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT’s involvement
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28:04 - 28:08from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present.
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28:08 - 28:14I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made,
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28:14 - 28:17in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took.
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28:17 - 28:21I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it."
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28:21 - 28:24I also want to read the statement of JSTOR.
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28:24 - 28:32That’s the nonprofit, that is the archive of all of the documents that Aaron was downloading.
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28:32 - 28:37Over the weekend, JSTOR expressed deep condolences to the Swartz family
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28:37 - 28:41and maintained the case had been instigated by the U.S. attorney’s office. They wrote, quote,
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28:41 - 28:45"The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset,
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28:45 - 28:51since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge.
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28:51 - 28:55At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world,
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28:55 - 29:00we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content.
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29:00 - 29:04To that end, Aaron returned the data he had in his possession
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29:04 - 29:10and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011."
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29:10 - 29:18And now I want to play a comment of Aaron Swartz himself about JSTOR, about these documents.
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29:21 - 29:29This was a comment made by Aaron Swartz at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October of 2010.
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29:29 - 29:30He spoke about JSTOR.
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29:31 - 29:35[Swartz] I am going to give you one example of something not as big as saving Congress,
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29:35 - 29:38but something important that you can do right here at your own school.
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29:39 - 29:42It just requires willing to get your shoes a little bit muddy.
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29:44 - 29:47By virtue of being students at a major U.S. university,
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29:47 - 29:51I assume that you have access to a wide variety of scholarly journals.
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29:51 - 29:56Pretty much every major university in the United States pays these sort of licensing fees
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29:56 - 30:02to organizations like JSTOR and Thomson and ISI to get access to scholarly journals
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30:02 - 30:04that the rest of the world can’t read.
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30:04 - 30:06And these licensing fees are substantial.
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30:06 - 30:11And they’re so substantial that people who are studying in India, instead of studying in the United States,
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30:11 - 30:13don’t have this kind of access.
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30:13 - 30:16They’re locked out from all of these journals.
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30:16 - 30:19They’re locked out from our entire scientific legacy.
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30:20 - 30:23I mean, a lot of these journal articles, they go back to the Enlightenment.
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30:24 - 30:28Every time someone has written down a scientific paper, it’s been scanned and digitized
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30:28 - 30:29and put in these collections.
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30:30 - 30:35That is a legacy that has been brought to us by the history of people doing interesting work,
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30:35 - 30:36the history of scientists.
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30:36 - 30:40It’s a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people,
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30:40 - 30:45but instead it’s been locked up and put online by a handful of for-profit corporations
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30:45 - 30:48who then try and get the maximum profit they can out of it.
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30:50 - 30:54Now, there are people, good people, trying to change this with the open access movement.
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30:54 - 30:58So, all journals, going forward, they’re encouraging them to publish their work as open access,
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30:58 - 31:01so open on the Internet, available for download by everybody,
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31:01 - 31:06available for free copying, and perhaps even modification with attribution and notice.
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31:07 - 31:09AMY GOODMAN: That was Aaron Swartz speaking,
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31:09 - 31:13University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, October 2010, about JSTOR.
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31:13 - 31:15That was before he was arrested.
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31:15 - 31:23Professor Lawrence Lessig, the significance of what Aaron was dedicating his life to,
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31:23 - 31:28before we move on to the speech that he gave last year to play in full?
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31:30 - 31:34[Lessig] Yeah, he was dedicating his life to building a world,
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31:34 - 31:39a nation at least, but a world that was as idealistic as he was.
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31:39 - 31:45And he was impatient with us, and he was disappointed with us, with all of us,
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31:45 - 31:47as we moved through this fight.
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31:48 - 31:53And he—as he grew impatient, he called on people to do more.
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31:53 - 32:01And it is incredibly hard for all of us who were close to him to accept the recognition
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32:01 - 32:06that maybe if we had done more, maybe if we had done more,
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32:08 - 32:11this wouldn’t have seemed so bleak to him, maybe if we had stopped this prosecution.
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32:12 - 32:18I received an email from JSTOR four days before Aaron died, from the president of JSTOR,
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32:18 - 32:24announcing, celebrating that JSTOR was going to release all of these journal articles
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32:24 - 32:29to anybody around the world who wanted access—exactly what Aaron was fighting for.
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32:30 - 32:36And I didn’t have time to send it to Aaron; I was on—I was traveling.
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32:36 - 32:39But I looked forward to seeing him again—I had just seen him the week before—
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32:39 - 32:42and celebrating that this is what had happened.
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32:42 - 32:45So, all of us think there are a thousand things we could have done,
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32:47 - 32:53a thousand things we could have done, and we have to do,
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32:54 - 32:58because Aaron Swartz is now an icon, an ideal.
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32:59 - 33:04He is what we will be fighting for, all of us, for the rest of our lives.
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33:07 - 33:15[Goodman] Professor Lessig, on November 27, 2007, Aaron blogged about his depressed mood. He said,
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33:15 - 33:17"Surely there have been times when you’ve been sad.
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33:18 - 33:21Perhaps a loved one has abandoned you or a plan has gone horribly awry.
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33:21 - 33:25Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless.
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33:25 - 33:28You wonder whether it’s worth going on.
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33:28 - 33:30Everything you think about seems bleak—
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33:30 - 33:33the things you’ve done, the things you hope to do, the people around you.
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33:33 - 33:35You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off.
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33:35 - 33:42Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either."
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33:42 - 33:51What about Aaron’s state of mind, how he kept up his spirits, especially during this very, very difficult time,
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33:51 - 33:53also struggling with depression?
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33:55 - 33:56[Lessig] Yeah, Aaron was depressed.
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33:56 - 33:59He was rationally depressed.
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34:00 - 34:02You know, he was losing everything,
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34:03 - 34:08because his government was overreaching in the most ridiculous way to persecute him,
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34:08 - 34:11not just because of this, but because of what he had done before,
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34:11 - 34:15liberating government documents that were supposed to be in the public domain.
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34:15 - 34:17Of course he was depressed.
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34:18 - 34:20He wasn’t depressed because he had no loving parents
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34:20 - 34:23—he did have loving parents who did everything they could for him—
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34:23 - 34:25or because he didn’t have loving friends.
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34:25 - 34:29Every time you saw Aaron, he was surrounded by five or ten different people
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34:29 - 34:31who loved and respected and worked with him.
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34:31 - 34:35He was depressed because he was increasingly recognizing
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34:35 - 34:39that the idealism he brought to this fight maybe wasn’t enough.
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34:39 - 34:42When he saw all of his wealth gone,
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34:42 - 34:47and he recognized his parents were going to have to mortgage their house so he could afford a lawyer
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34:47 - 34:52to fight a government that treated him as if he were a 9/11 terrorist,
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34:52 - 34:56as if what he was doing was threatening the infrastructure of the United States,
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34:56 - 35:02when he saw that and he recognized how—how incredibly difficult that fight was going to be,
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35:02 - 35:03of course he was depressed.
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35:03 - 35:06Now, you know, I’m not a psychiatrist.
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35:06 - 35:11I don’t know whether there was something wrong with him because of—you know,
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35:11 - 35:14beyond the rational reason he had to be depressed,
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35:14 - 35:19but I don’t—I don’t—I don’t have patience for people who want to say,
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35:19 - 35:21"Oh, this was just a crazy person;
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35:21 - 35:25" this was just a person with a psychological problem who killed himself."
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35:25 - 35:31No. This was somebody—this was somebody who was pushed to the edge
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35:31 - 35:34by what I think of as a kind of bullying by our government.
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35:34 - 35:36A bullying by our government.
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35:36 - 35:41And just as we hold people responsible when their bullying leads to tragedy,
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35:41 - 35:46I hope Carmen Ortiz does what MIT did and hold a prop—
[Goodman] The U.S. attorney. -
35:46 - 35:47[Lessig] The U.S. attorney
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35:48 - 35:52—and lead an investigation, ask somebody independent
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35:52 - 35:55to look at what happened here and explain to America:
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35:55 - 35:57Is this what the United States government is?
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35:57 - 36:01[Goodman] Professor Lessig, we want to end with the words of Aaron himself.
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36:01 - 36:04And we're not going to go to our second break: I want to warn all our stations,
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36:04 - 36:07because - in order to fit in this whole speech
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36:07 - 36:11This is a speech that Aaron Swartz gave,
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36:11 - 36:14the cyberactivist, computer programmer who took his life on Friday,
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36:14 - 36:19speaking last May about the battle to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA.
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36:20 - 36:20[For Aaron Swartz's speech with subtitles: http://youtu.be/Fgh2dFngFsg ]
- Title:
- Lawrence Lessig's interview about Aaron Swartz on Democracy Now!
- Description:
-
Amy Woodhouse's "The War and Peace Report" broadcast - Democracy Now! Jan 14, 2013. The interview of Lawrence Lessig about Aaron Swartz (from 15:19) has English subtitles based on the transcript provided in http://www.democracynow.org/2013/1/14/an_incredible_soul_lawrence_lessig_remembers .
The interview is followed by Aaron Swartz's "How we stopped SOPA" keynote (F2C:Freedom to Connect 2012, Washington DC on May 21 2012).
This keynote can be viewed with English subtitles at http://youtu.be/Fgh2dFngFsg , and subtitles in other languages can be made from http://www.amara.org/en/videos/FE2FZMLRcnqR/info/ . - Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- Captions Requested
- Duration:
- 36:08
Claude Almansi edited English subtitles for Lawrence Lessig's interview about Aaron Swartz on Democracy Now! | ||
jacdez edited English subtitles for Lawrence Lessig's interview about Aaron Swartz on Democracy Now! | ||
Claude Almansi edited English subtitles for Lawrence Lessig's interview about Aaron Swartz on Democracy Now! | ||
Claude Almansi edited English subtitles for Lawrence Lessig's interview about Aaron Swartz on Democracy Now! | ||
Claude Almansi edited English subtitles for Lawrence Lessig's interview about Aaron Swartz on Democracy Now! | ||
Claude Almansi edited English subtitles for Lawrence Lessig's interview about Aaron Swartz on Democracy Now! | ||
Claude Almansi edited English subtitles for Lawrence Lessig's interview about Aaron Swartz on Democracy Now! | ||
Claude Almansi edited English subtitles for Lawrence Lessig's interview about Aaron Swartz on Democracy Now! |