The Guerilla Open Access Movement: How Aaron Swartz changed the way we think about piracy

“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.”

These words come from the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, published in 2008. In the two-page-long document, the author urged people to use both legal and illegal methods to make information available for the public good through access to academic publishers and information databases.

Condemning the “private theft of public culture,” the text argued that forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues, scanning entire libraries but only allowing Google to access them, and providing scientific articles to scholars in developed countries but not to children in the Global South was “outrageous and unacceptable.”

The manifesto was authored by Aaron Swartz.

This month, digital rights activists and academics will remember Mr. Swartz and his efforts to make the internet a more open place. The American technologist and activist died by suicide at the age of 26 on January 11, 2013, while he was fighting a legal case that forever changed the way people worldwide think about digital piracy.

What is Aaron Swartz’s legacy?

If you have ever illegally downloaded a book you needed, used an image from Wikipedia to illustrate a project, scrolled through Reddit, or visited a website that was automatically updated with new content, you have already encountered Aaron Swartz’s controversial legacy.

From his earliest years, he was passionate about reading and gathering knowledge, but rejected the traditional school system. Throughout his life and even afterwards, friends, co-workers, and loved ones identified Mr. Swartz as a genius who excelled at programming, came up with new tech frameworks to improve the internet, studied political systems with keen interest, and felt deeply for those from less fortunate backgrounds.

As a teenager, he co-created and advanced RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which is used by numerous websites today to bring new updates to their pages from diverse sources across the web. Mr. Swartz also worked with the Creative Commons organisation, whose work focuses on sharing media such as art, images, photos, etc. with more people to legally use in their own work.

He dropped out of Stanford University, and created Infogami, a platform that merged with Reddit in 2005. Multiple technologists credit Mr. Swartz as a Reddit co-founder for his contributions to the platform.

Throughout his life, Mr. Swartz wanted to use technology to make information freely available to the public. However, the actions he took to achieve this—such as downloading a huge number of documents and scraping data from official websites—attracted legal attention and even FBI surveillance.

In 2008, the same year the Manifesto was published, Mr. Swartz downloaded about 2.7 million documents from the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database. Despite the words “public access” in the name, most users had to pay a per-page fee to access these documents. The FBI began to investigate the 22-year-old and kept a file on him that is now publicly available to read, but did not pursue action.

What was the case against him?

Aaron Swartz was at the centre of the JSTOR downloads case, during which he died by suicide. According to the U.S. authorities, Mr. Swartz allegedly tried breaking into a computer wiring closet at MIT between 2010 and 2011 to access its network and download content from the JSTOR digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources. He was later caught on camera and arrested in January 2011.

On July 19, 2011, Mr. Swartz, then 24, was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Massachusetts.

The 24-year-old’s explicit reasons for his actions were not entirely clear, but aligned with the views shared in the earlier Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. JSTOR also noted in 2011 that the downloads were “allegedly for the purpose of posting it to file sharing sites.”

Ultimately, technologists and internet users around the world were shocked by the severity of the legal action brought against Mr. Swartz over downloading documents from an academic library. Meanwhile, those critical of Mr. Swartz’s approach believed he should have been prepared for legal repercussions and prosecution when considering the guerilla-style nature of his activism.

According to the release, Mr. Swartz could have faced up to 35 years in prison—even though JSTOR itself did not want to press charges. In June 2011, in fact, JSTOR and Mr. Swartz reached a settlement. According to the organisation, Mr. Swartz agreed to turn over all copies of the downloaded articles, and also certified that he had not distributed them.

His downloaded content included over four million articles, book reviews, and matter from JSTOR partners’ academic journals and other publications. JSTOR noted there was no personally identifying information about its users.

The law enforcement authorities, however, took a far stronger view.

“Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away,” said U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz in an official statement.

What is the current state of the case?

On January 11, 2013, Mr. Swartz’s partner found him dead in their home. The reasons for his suicide are unclear as no note was found. His family and partner blamed the decisions made by officials at MIT and the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office for contributing to Mr. Swartz’s death, citing a system “rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”

Ms. Ortiz expressed her condolences, but defended her office’s actions.

“I know that there is little I can say to abate the anger felt by those who believe that this office’s prosecution of Mr. Swartz was unwarranted and somehow led to the tragic result of him taking his own life. I must, however, make clear that this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case,” she said.

The statement went on to highlight that there was no evidence indicating that Mr. Swartz acted for personal financial gain. Ms. Ortiz also added that her office never sought the maximum penalties under the law, and that a far shorter sentence, such as six months in a low-security setting, had been discussed.

The case was dismissed due to Mr. Swartz’s death.

What was the impact of Aaron Swartz’s actions?

Mr. Swartz’s suicide shocked the world, particularly impacting academics, the tech community, and Open Access advocates. After his death, his writing greatly shaped the way people thought about piracy. While publishers and media companies describe digital piracy in terms of theft and loss, Mr. Swartz reframed such acts as sharing knowledge and focused on the importance of creating copies in opposition to private paywalls.

In September 2011, when Mr. Swartz was still alive, JSTOR announced that it was making its journal content published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 in other places freely available to the public for reading and downloading. This represented about 6% of the total content on JSTOR, per the organisation.

Without naming Mr. Swartz, JSTOR Managing Director Laura Brown acknowledged that people might link the decision to the JSTOR downloads incident, noting, “it would be inaccurate to say that these events have had no impact on our planning”.

In 2026, close to 13 years after Mr. Swartz’s death, shadow libraries or piracy databases with downloadable books, academic papers, and other media formats continue to enable Open Access and Guerilla Open Access by making both public domain and copyrighted media available through the deep web. While academic and trade publishers world over have filed multiple cases in order to have the offending URLs taken down internationally, mirror versions and alternative URLs continue to pop up.

Furthermore, Big Tech companies including Meta, xAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI have been sued for allegedly scraping huge volumes of copyrighted material in order to train their Generative AI models.

However, Mr. Swartz’s supporters were quick to point out the difference between the swift legal action brought against the 24-year-old over his alleged JSTOR downloads in 2011 and the ongoing lawsuits against Big Tech CEOs in 2026, whom creatives have accused of enabling mass piracy for private profit.

On November 8 last year, Mr. Swartz’s mother posted that Aaron “should/would be 39 years old today”.

Those in distress or having suicidal thoughts are encouraged to seek help and counselling by calling the helpline numbers here