Tag Archive

copyright

The Politics of Information Access: Contextualizing Aaron Swartz in American Intellectual History

Peters, Justin. The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet.     New York: Scribner, 2016. 337 pages.Review by Scott Richard St. Louis             Late in September 2010, a skilled programmer accessed a computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and executed a script designed to download JSTOR articles at alarming speed. Known as scraping, this process violated JSTOR’s terms of service and threatened to overwhelm the JSTOR servers in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Staffers at JSTOR responded by banning the scraper’s MIT IP address. However, the scraping resumed early the next morning at a different MIT IP Read more