Troll Face IRL (Photo: Creative Commons)

Yesterday, we told you about the new charges being brought against early Reddit employee and activist coder Aaron Swartz. He's now facing 13 federal counts after allegedly downloading large portions of JSTOR, an academic database filled with articles and data, in order to release it to the public for free use.

Today it seems that Mr. Swartz has a potentially influential ally in his corner--Bettina Neuefeind, wife of Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig.

She is the organizer behind the site free.aaronsw.com to raise money for his defense. At the top of the homepage, it says, “The fund is overseen by Bettina Neuefeind and funds go directly to pay legal costs.”

Ms. Neuefeind's husband is Larry Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons and the director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Mr. Swartz is a former fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics. His whole alleged crime was based off of the belief of fair use, the ideals that Creative Commons holds up. And according to this 2011 article by The Harvard Crimson, "He [Swartz] also helped design the standards that underlie Creative Commons and RSS technology."

Her husband's professional affiliations aside, Ms. Neuefeind’s involvement hardly comes as a surprise. She describes herself in an online profile as "a housing and disability rights lawyer, mother of three and social activist very focused on public health, nutrition, sustainability and social justice."

It’s unclear whether or not Mr. Lessig is directly connected to this defense fund, but the three individuals are certainly connected. Take, for instance, Ms. Neuefeind's and Mr. Swartz's appearance in Mr. Lessig’s 50th birthday lip sync video:

UPDATE: Reached by email, Mr. Lessig told Betabeat, " My wife is a friend of Aaron and a lawyer. She's known him for more than a decade. She offered to help."

Mr. Swartz (Photo: Wikipedia)

You may remember activist coder Aaron Swartz, an early Reddit employee who was charged with four felonies last year for daring to illegally download academic articles off of JSTOR through the MIT network. Now, the 25-year-old Mr. Swartz, who serves as the executive director of the progressive political action committee Demand Progress, has been charged by the federal government with nine more felonies for breaching hacking laws, bringing the total to 13.

According to Wired:

[Mr. Swartz] has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. He surrendered in July 2011, remains free on bond and faces dozens of years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted.

Like last year’s original grand jury indictment on four felony counts, (.pdf) the superseding indictment (.pdf) unveiled Thursday accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading millions of documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals that are normally inaccessible to the public.

Mr. Swartz wasn't just dodging a paywall to nab an article he needed to write an academic paper. He was allegedly using a program that continuously scraped academic information and datasets from JSTOR, one so powerful that the indictment says it took down JSTOR's servers multiple times. Mr. Swartz's motives for downloading all those docs? Information wants to be free, man.

Still, it helps to keep Mr. Swartz's alleged crimes in perspective--downloading scholarly articles isn't exactly trafficking heroin. We have no doubt the former fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics has a righteous argument for not keeping academic informtion behind a paywall.