Guerilla Open Access Manifesto Critique

For those of you who aren’t wholly familiar with the case of Aaron Swartz and in particular his “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” you can find it here: https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt

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Although I do fully understand the premise and reasoning behind Swartz’s advocacy for his “Open Access” movement, I felt as though he painted his cause in an unfavorable light at times in his call for action.

First let’s begin with this excerpt:

I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they 
make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — 
there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's 
already being done: we can fight back

The way Swartz framed this initial plea for assistance is entirely effective, as it creates a dichotomy between those who do and do not have access to particular information. Swartz begins to go wrong in mentioning the “something that’s already being done” about the issue at hand and declaring that “we can fight back.”

While staging a protest or inciting new legislature advocating for public Open Access may have seemed like a reasonable route of attack, Swartz takes a much more radical — and illegal — way of “fighting back.” (Swartz is mostly known for his involvement with hacking files from the US Government database PACER and the private scholarly journal database JSTOR)

You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords 
with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Here, yet again I have to fundamentally disagree with Swartz’s efforts to openly convince others to break the law with him! As someone with particular access to these journals as a student at Wake Forest University, I feel highly uncomfortable with the prospect of leaking those articles for everyone to see. It doesn’t feel as though it is my place, and I absolutely not feel as though I have a “duty” as Swartz describes here, and I’m honestly not sure it was Aaron Swartz’s place to decide either. His radical approach and extreme tactics in extracting information from both Government and privatized databases breach what I believe to be morally acceptable, and although some of Swartz’s sentiments about “Open Access” are certainly valid, he took a highly controversial risk in doing what he did.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the 
privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

This conclusory section of his manifesto represents Swartz’s keen desire to influence his followers to assist him in his mission, although at this point of the manifesto I was left utterly unconvinced and somewhat uncomfortable with what Swartz was asking myself and others to do.

I viewed this document as extremely incriminating of Swartz based upon my knowledge of the legal aftermath of his actions. It seems as though every idea Swartz presents in this publishing has something to do with his subsequent pirating of articles from JSTOR at MIT. In my opinion, this manifesto clearly marks out a desire to liberate information against the desire of those who possess it, and overall I found this manifesto to be particularly troubling considering the immense capability for change Swartz could have ushered in had he not chose to actively break the law.