In September 2008, Aaron Swartz commissioned a friend to walk into a federal law library in Sacramento with a thumb drive. The building was one of 17 in the country with unlimited access to the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database, a service that normally chargers users a fee for each page of downloaded federal court records. With the intention of delivering free public records to the public, the friend installed a Perl script written in part by Schwartz on one of the computers and walked out.

Over the course of two weeks, the script pilfered a document from the system every 3 seconds and uploaded it to an Amazon cloud server.  Swartz then donated the documents to Carl Malamud’s non-profit website, public.resource.org, which aimed to liberate all public records from internet paywalls. By the time court administrators saw a $1.5 million spike in access fees on Sept. 29th, Schwartz had already made off with 2.7 million documents. (Source: Timothy Lee, Ars Tecnica)

Exactly one year ago, Aaron Swartz took his life in his Brooklyn apartment. Since then much has been said whether the notoriously harried FBI suspect was indeed a martyr for the cause of internet freedom, or another bright young man plagued by a dark cloud. But what’s not up for debate was his real-world impact on the culture of the internet: his programming contributions to the hugely popular website, Reddit (which, in the interest of full disclosure, I admit to frequenting,) and his showdowns as an activist against JSTOR, which opened up their taxpayer-funded research to the public as a result of his hounding. Swartz was posthumously awarded the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and will be honored in an anti-surveillance protest come February called The Day We Fight Back.

However, while Swartz will be lauded for his vigorous protesting of SOPA, and PIPA—censorship legislation proposed by members of congress— his work in the interest of freeing up court records will , as it has in the past, go largely unnoticed. So it is here that I draw attention to RECAP, a Chrome and Firefox extension that has been likened to the Napster of PACER, whereby purchased federal court documents can be uploaded and shared with anyone who chooses to view them. This would not have been possible without Swartz. Or to take another example, the aforementioned public.resource.org that has an enormous collection of free public court records thanks to the 2008 document heist. Notwithstanding these advents, costs of electronic records in the public domain are still shrouded behind unnecessary costs.

Taken from a page of public.resource.org titled “The PACER Problem” is a quote from Swartz’s contemporary Carl Malamud:

We are a nation of laws, but the laws are not publicly available. This is a fundamental issue for democracy, for if we are a nation of laws, we must be able to consult the cases and codes of our government.

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Jimmy Hoover (@jimmyhoover3)

Featured image courtesy of [Daniel J. Sieradski via Wikipedia]

Jimmy Hoover

Jimmy Hoover is a graduate of the University of Maryland College Park and formerly an intern at Law Street Media. Contact Jimmy at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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On November 13, WikiLeaks, a nonprofit media organization that prides itself on divulging imperative information to the public, leaked a draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. The agreement was being secretly negotiated among our government’s policymakers in order to avoid public uproar and backlash that may result in the watering down of some of the agreement’s regulations. If there is a need to smuggle proposed legislation into enactment in a democratic society for fear of being met with opposition, then maybe the law isn’t representative of the majority’s voice.

This law is far worse than SOPA and PIPA combined. It’s a “free trade” pact between 12 countries, including the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. What it really is is an agenda effectuated by corporate powerhouses that want greater intellectual property protection at the cost of freedom of expression and creation.

Three key provisions of the TPP that will affect you and should elicit your interest:

Our internet service providers will become the copyright coalition. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) takedown notice procedures provide Internet Service Providers (ISPs) with safeguards against suit for copyright infringement committed by its users. If a user is accused of infringement, the ISP, upon receiving the takedown notice, must immediately delete the infringing content pending a determination of infringement in order to avoid liability for the posted material.  If you think this is unfair, the TPP takes it a step further. The TPP grants legal incentives to these internet middlemen in exchange for their participation as copyright police (essentially). Why does this matter? Well these provisions could potentially result in the filtering of user content for possibly infringing material. Websites that may contain infringing material, including social media hangouts, have a chance of being blocked by these ISPs so that the provider can circumvent liability for infringing material transferred through the internet. And think about it from an economic standpoint. How much would it cost for ISPs to comb through every bit of user-generated content to determine if there are copyright concerns? It’s definitely a lot more than simply running a prudent internet service that limits access to certain sites and web platforms.

Patent powers will be used for evil.  The TPP makes patents more easily accessible for the pharmaceutical industry by including an entire section in the agreement devoted to opening the pathways to patent protection for specifically this industry.  Additionally, patent applicants in this industry will be able to limit the availability of the scientific info that was utilized to create the medicine, which operates to give the pharm moguls a huge amount of leverage against other creators. The price of medicine will undoubtedly increase, and I think that was the whole purpose of this particular law to begin with.

Protection will infringe on constitutional rights. Our constitution aims to encourage invention and the arts by limiting the time period for which a holder of intellectual property can assert his or her rights. This law proposes to extend the years of copyright protection by 20 years and thus further minimize the amount of information available in the public domain from which new works can be created.

And that’s only just the tip! For the full leaked version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, click here.  I strongly advise you to look it over or read a few summaries on it when you get the chance. The availability of knowledge and legal space for innovation will be dramatically decreased by the TPP.  And should our democratic values be neglected in the interest of corporate wealth? NO! So do something.

Please take a few seconds to sign this petition to stop the TPP here.

Gena.

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Gena Thomas, a recent graduate of Howard University School of Law, was born and raised in Lafayette, Louisiana. A graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, she enjoys watching scary movies and acquiring calories from chocolates of all sorts.

Featured image courtesy of [hdzimmermann via Flickr]

Gena Thomas

Gena Thomas, a recent graduate of Howard University School of Law, was born and raised in Lafayette, Louisiana. A graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, she enjoys watching scary movies and acquiring calories from chocolates of all sorts. Contact Gena at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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