Professor Samuelson’s article “Aaron Swartz: Opening access to knowledge”, open a variety of important points on morals and ethics that Aaron Swartz was attempting to face before ultimately taking his own life. His “theft” of articles from JSTOR is the act of a modern day Peter Pan. It ultimately raises a few questions and the ethics of information holding at the attempt to gain profit.
It is just to withhold knowledge from the public? Is it acceptable to repress the lower class, who aren’t able to access said knowledge without a platinum visa card? Knowledge is what improves a society; essentially its like an enzyme. It increases societies improvement,as a whole. It destroy’s the vicious cycle that chains the poor from achieving success. By crumbling this “information barrier”, this nasty mechanism designed to gain profits, we can remove the chains of repression from the poor and marginalized and improve society as a whole.
