Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
A short 2008 text signed by Aaron Swartz urging anyone with access to paywalled research to share it.
Dated July 2008 from Eremo, Italy, the manifesto argued that the world's scientific heritage was being digitised and locked behind publishers' paywalls, and that students, librarians and researchers with access had a moral duty to download it and pass it on. Complying with unjust copyright was framed as complicity.
Its real weight came later. When Swartz was indicted in 2011 for downloading millions of articles from JSTOR, prosecutors cited the manifesto as evidence of intent under the CFAA. After his death in 2013 it became a rallying text for the open access movement — and is now quoted approvingly by some of the same institutions whose licence terms it attacked.