IP valuation consultants, such as CONSOR, place value in all types of intellectual property assets, including patents, trademarks and copyrights. It is our business and we encourage enforcement of those valuable rights. But you have to take a moment to reflect whether or not enforcement of those rights is worth a life, in particular the life of Aaron Swartz.
Last Friday at the age of 26, Aaron Swartz died by hanging. Swartz was a strong believer in “freeing” information and was scheduled to be on trial in April for downloading approximately 4 million academic journals from JSTOR (a digital library). Swartz was said to have opposed JSTOR’s practice of compensating publishers, rather than authors, from the fees JSTOR charged and therefore limited access to academic work produced at colleges and universities. JSTOR did not press charges, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office did. For those allegations, Swartz was looking at a possible 35-50 years in prison and millions in fines. Note that bank robbery carries a maximum of 25 years, manslaughter a maximum of 10 years, and threatening the president a maximum of 5 years. Two days before Swartz’s death, JSTOR announced they would make more than 4.5 million articles available to the public for free.
At the age of 14, Swartz was a co-creator of RSS 1.0, Later he founded the software company Infogami which soon merged with Reddit. Swartz also protested vehemently against the passing of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which was a bill designed to monitor the Internet for copyright violations and provide easier methods to shut down infringing websites. After its defeat Swartz said, “There’s a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands…[SOPA] instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights we’d always taken for granted.”
Now, CONSOR’s Chairman Weston Anson is himself actively involved, through his work on INTA committees, into finding solutions to the problem of online sales of unlicensed products. We realize strongly the value of intellectual property whether it comes in the form of trademarked clothing, patented pharmaceuticals, or copyrighted academic papers.
The beauty of the Internet is also its curse. Knowledge can be easily shared, but knowledge is valuable. Individuals and companies invest lots of time and funds into creating their intellectual properties and should be duly compensated.
On the other hand, as Swartz argued, should some knowledge be shared with the public for the greater good? (Note that Swartz was also investigated in 2009 for the release of 20% of the PACER database. He felt that PACER should not be charging the 8 cents a page that he believed should have been free since government documents are not covered by copyright.)
Can a balance be reached? Can laws and enforcement keep up with technology? Will Swartz’s death be a catalyst one way or the other? Whether you realize it or not, the value of IP affects everyone. Whether you are a student conducting research and need a particular white paper, to the international retailer who wants to protect their designs — we all need to pay attention to the use and abuse of IP on the Internet. But was it worth this brilliant young man’s life, we say not.