'The Internet's Own Boy,' a documentary by Brian Knappenberger, tells the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz, who killed himself on January 11, 2013 at the young age of 26. Swartz, who helped create an early version of the Web feed system RSS and was facing federal criminal charges in a controversial fraud case.
The documentary features interviews with his family and friends as well as the Internet luminaries who worked with him. The film tells his story up to his eventual suicide after a legal battle, and explores the questions of access to information and civil liberties that drove his work.
Over the years, Swartz became an online icon for helping to make a virtual mountain of information freely available to the public, including an estimated 19 million pages of federal court documents from the PACER case-law system. "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves," Swartz wrote in an online "manifesto" dated 2008.
That belief - that information should be shared and available for the good of society - prompted Swartz to found the nonprofit group DemandProgress. The group led a successful campaign to block a bill introduced in 2011 in the US House of Representatives called the Stop Online Piracy Act.
The bill, which was withdrawn amid public pressure, would have allowed court orders to curb access to certain websites deemed to be engaging in illegal sharing of intellectual property. Swartz and other activists objected on the grounds it would give the government too many broad powers to censor and squelch legitimate Web communication.
But Swartz faced trouble in July 2011, when he was indicted by a federal grand jury of wire fraud, computer fraud and other charges related to allegedly stealing millions of academic articles and journals from a digital archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
According to the federal indictment, Swartz - who was a fellow at Harvard University's Edmond J Safra Center for Ethics - used MIT's computer networks to steal more than 4 million articles from JSTOR, an online archive and journal distribution service. JSTOR did not press charges against Swartz after the digitised copies of the articles were returned, according to media reports at the time.
Swartz, who pleaded not guilty to all counts, faced 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted. He was released on bond.
Swartz also played a role in building the news-sharing website Reddit, but left the company after it was acquired by Wired magazine owner Conde Nast. Recalling that time of his life, Swartz described his struggles with dark feelings. In an online account of his life and work, Swartz said he became "miserable" after going to work at the San Francisco offices of Wired after Reddit was acquired. "I took a long Christmas vacation," he wrote. "I got sick. I thought of suicide. I ran from the police. And when I got back on Monday morning, I was asked to resign."
The documentary is available under Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-SA) licence.
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