Amy Goodman — Aaron Swartz on the Fight for Internet Freedom

Aaron Swartz: So, you might say, surely COICA would get declared unconstitutional, as well. But I knew that the Supreme Court had a blind spot around the First Amendment, more than anything else, more than slander or libel, more than pornography, more even than child pornography. Their blind spot was copyright. When it came to copyright, it was like the part of the justices’ brains shut off, and they just totally forgot about the First Amendment. You got the sense that, deep down, they didn’t even think the First Amendment applied when copyright was at issue, which means that if you did want to censor the Internet, if you wanted to come up with some way that the government could shut down access to particular websites, this bill might be the only way to do it. If it was about pornography, it probably would get overturned by courts, just like the adult bookstore case. But if you claimed it was about copyright, it might just sneak through.

And that was especially terrifying, because, as you know, because copyright is everywhere. If you want to shut down WikiLeaks, it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that you’re doing it because they have too much pornography, but it’s not hard at all to claim that WikiLeaks is violating copyright, because everything is copyrighted. This speech, you know, the thing I’m giving right now, these words are copyrighted. And it’s so easy to accidentally copy something, so easy, in fact, that the leading Republican supporter of COICA, Orrin Hatch, had illegally copied a bunch of code into his own Senate website. So if even Orrin Hatch’s Senate website was found to be violating copyright law, what’s the chance that they wouldn’t find something they could pin on any of us? [emphasis added]

AlterNet
Aaron Swartz on the Fight for Internet Freedom
Amy Goodman | Democracy Now

Aaron Swartz is framed as the bad guy in many media reports of his "regrettable" death because he was "breaking the law and got caught," rather than as a victim of state intimidation in service of those collecting economic rent from artificial scarcity.

“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." — Malcolm X (h/t Stephan Ewald)