Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, the oldest of three sons of a software entrepreneur, and was building things online almost as soon as he could type: he helped write the RSS 1.0 web-syndication specification at fourteen, spent time as a young teenager working with the World Wide Web Consortium on early web standards, and co-created the lightweight text-formatting language Markdown with John Gruber at seventeen. He enrolled at Stanford in 2004, found the coursework slow next to what he was already doing on his own, and left after a year. That year he also built Infogami, a web-publishing startup accepted into Y Combinator's first class, which merged with a fledgling link-sharing site called Reddit — a merger that later made Swartz's exact role in Reddit's founding a matter of genuine, ongoing dispute rather than settled fact.

After Conde Nast bought Reddit in 2006, Swartz left within months, uncomfortable with corporate life, and spent the following years building the technical architecture behind Creative Commons licensing, writing a 2008 manifesto arguing that locking publicly funded research behind paywalls was a moral wrong worth breaking the law to correct, and co-founding the advocacy group Demand Progress in 2010. That group became one of the loudest voices in the 2011 and 2012 campaign that helped kill the Stop Online Piracy Act. In parallel, starting in September 2010, Swartz used an MIT network connection to download several million academic articles from the subscription database JSTOR, an act MIT police and federal investigators treated as a crime; he was arrested in January 2011 and, by September 2012, indicted on thirteen federal felony counts carrying a cumulative maximum of thirty-five years in prison.

Prosecutors offered Swartz a plea deal of six months in federal prison if he pleaded guilty to multiple felonies; he refused, and the case moved toward a trial that could, on paper, have kept him locked up for decades, even though JSTOR itself had settled its own civil complaint against him and asked prosecutors not to pursue criminal charges. Whether the government's pursuit of the case was ordinary enforcement of computer-fraud law or a wildly disproportionate response to an act of civil disobedience remains genuinely disputed. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, a friend and mentor, called it overzealous prosecution built to make an example of him; U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz maintained her office's conduct was appropriate throughout; and MIT's own internal review found the university had stayed neutral rather than advocating for Swartz, even after it had supported the initial investigation. Swartz died by suicide in his Brooklyn apartment on January 11, 2013, at twenty-six, before any of it went to trial.

The federal charges were dropped automatically at his death. Legislators introduced Aaron's Law within weeks to narrow the computer-crime statute used against him, but it never passed Congress. What survived instead was scattered through the infrastructure he had built before any of the prosecution began: Markdown still formats a large share of the internet's plain-text writing, RSS still syndicates web content two decades after his contribution to its 1.0 specification, and the open-access argument from his 2008 manifesto became mainstream enough that most large research funders now require the publicly funded work they pay for to be freely readable. He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame and received the American Library Association's James Madison Award, both in 2013, and an annual Aaron Swartz Day still gathers programmers and activists every November 8, his birthday, to keep arguing the case he was never tried for.

Aaron Swartz's life against the full span of the corpus.

• RSS 1.0 specification invention
  Co-authored the web-syndication standard at age fourteen 2000
• Markdown invention
  Co-created with John Gruber 2004
• Infogami company
  Y Combinator startup that merged with the fledgling Reddit 2005
• Guerilla Open Access Manifesto article
  Argued for civil disobedience against paywalled academic research 2008
• Demand Progress company
  Advocacy group co-founded to fight the Stop Online Piracy Act 2010

• November 8, 1986 aged 0 Born in Highland Park, Illinois
• 2000 aged ~14 Helps write the RSS 1.0 web-syndication specification at fourteen
• 2004 aged ~18 Co-creates Markdown with John Gruber and enrolls at Stanford
• 2005 aged ~19 Infogami merges with Reddit in Y Combinator's first class
• 2006 aged ~20 Leaves Reddit after Conde Nast's acquisition of the company
• September 2010 aged 23 Begins downloading JSTOR articles over MIT's network
• January 6, 2011 aged 24 Arrested by MIT police
• September 12, 2012 aged 25 Indicted on thirteen federal felony counts
• January 11, 2013 aged 26 Dies by suicide in Brooklyn, New York, at twenty-six

• Alexis Ohanian b. 1983
  Co-founder of Reddit and venture capitalist who has championed open internet and paternity leave. early collaborator, on uneven terms
• Lawrence Lessig b. 1961
  Harvard Law professor and activist who founded Creative Commons and campaigns against political corruption. defended by
• Tim Berners-Lee b. 1955
  British-American computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web, revolutionizing global information sharing. extended the open standards of
• Vint Cerf b. 1943
  Co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols that form the foundation of the internet. built on the internet architecture of