Aaron Swartz,
a leading activist of open access and copyright reform, committed suicide Friday January 11th in New York City.
Swartz was the founder of
Demand Progress, which launched the campaign
against the SOPA/PIPA censorship bills (SOPA/PIPA) and a
co-founder of Infogami, which merged with the internet aggregator
Reddit,.
He first entered the public limelight with his involvement in the standardization of RSS in 2001 as a ninth-grader. Most of his too-short twenty-six years of life were devoted to creating a more open web. Swartz's essays, which he posted to
his blog, were a staple of many young programmers' introduction to internet culture. His posts included "
Who Writes Wikipedia?" and "
How To Get a Job Like Mine."
His framework for web servers,
web.py, was first released in 2006 when Reddit switched from Lisp to Python and continues to be actively
used and updated. In a 2008 attempt to make a public version of the contents of the PACER public court records database, Swartz
angered government officials when they learned he had downloaded 20 million articles, which he subsequently made
freely available. In 2011, he was controversially
indicted for data theft for downloading large amounts from the academic article repository JSTOR. Despite JSTOR's reassurance that they had "
no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter," the case
continued with additional charges, for which Swartz could potentially have been
imprisoned for 50+ years. (A sentence
Lawrence Lessig bemoans.) He pled innocent in September of 2012. Many will contend that
Aaron Swartz died innocent.
RIP, Aaron Swartz
