Aaron Swartz is the founder of Demand Progress, which launched the campaign against the Internet censorship bills (SOPA/PIPA) and now has over a million members.

Aaron is also known for releasing government documents through the Internet in order to uncover corruption in the funding of climate change research. Subsequently, faced with prosecutors being overzealous and a dysfunctional criminal justice system, Aaron was charged with a maximum penalty of $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison, leading to a 2-year legal battle with the US federal government that ended when Aaron took his own life on January 11, 2013.

In October 2014, a book on Aaron’s work, titled "Raw Thought, Raw Nerve: Inside the mind of Aaron Swartz" was produced. The book was about Aaron and his writings. The unedited content of this book is publicly available on Aaron’s website: aaronsw.com. As I started to look for the book on the internet and in Barnes & Nobles, I came up empty. It was brought to my attention that the book had been pulled off the shelves and printing had stopped.

So I started to do my own investigation as to why the book, which had become a top seller, had been very quickly pulled off the shelves.

My findings are as follows:

• Discovery Publisher is the company that produced "Raw Thought, Raw Nerve: Inside the mind of Aaron Swartz". The publisher reported that they wish to reverse all benefits from the printed book sales to Aaron’s charity and make the e-version of the book freely available, as it presently is from their website;

  
  
• In an article titled "If I get hit by a truck", Aaron Swartz wrote: "I designate Sean B. Palmer as my virtual executor to organize such things. (And if you delete anything, Sean, I will haunt you from the grave!) I ask that the contents of all my hard drives be made publicly available. […] Copyright for my GPLed source code should revert to the Free Software Foundation." (article available from: http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/continuity
 ) [07-Nov-15: original file modified, see archived page at https://web.archive.org/web/20031217220719/http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/continuity ];
  
  
• Recently, Mr. Sean B. Palmer gave The New Press the exclusive right to Aaron’s Intellectual Property;

  
  
• Subsequently, The New Press put some lawyers at work and had a DMCA claim against Discovery Publisher that ended getting the book taken off the shelves.

I’m not sure why Mr. Sean B. Palmer gave The New Press the exclusive right to publish Aaron’s IP. Legally speaking, since he is the legal owner of Aaron’s IP, he is entitled to do whatever he likes with it, but IS THIS THE RIGHT THING TO DO knowing that Aaron was very much against abusive copyrights laws?

Further research led me to discover that Aaron believed traditional copyright laws were too restrictive to productive creativity; he was a fervent advocate of the Creative Commons copyright licenses, which help creators retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work, commercially or not.

So, to summarize, this petition is to:

1. Revert Mr. Sean B. Palmer’s decision to give EXCLUSIVE RIGHT on Aaron’s work, commercially or not, to The New Press or any other entities;

   
   
2. Revert The New Press’s legal action (i.e. DMCA) against publications on Aaron Swartz's writings;

   
   
3. Make sure that Aaron’s work is, once and for all, under Creative Commons copyright license. More specifically, under Creative Commons BY-ND license, which allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to Aaron Swartz.