One year ago this month, the young Internet freedom activist and groundbreaking programmer Aaron Swartz took his own life. Swartz died shortly before he was set to go to trial for downloading millions of academic articles from servers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology based on the belief that the articles should be freely available online. At the time he committed suicide, Swartz was facing 35 years in prison, a penalty supporters called excessively harsh…
— Democracy Now
A new documentary, “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,” was screened this week at the Sundance Film Festival. The video above, from a program on Democracy Now, includes excerpts from the film, along with interviews conducted with his lawyer and members of his family…
