Today, January 11, marks the 12th death anniversary of programmer and hacktivist Aaron Swartz.
A prodigious programmer and activist for open access, Swartz contributed to the development of RSS (Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication) 1.0, a web syndication technology. He was also a co-founder of Reddit and helped develop Creative Commons.
Swartz’s activism gained prominence when he downloaded millions of academic articles from the digital library JSTOR through the computer network of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to bring them out of the JSTOR’s paywall and make them public domain between 2010 and 2011.
However, this act of defiance led to his prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and wire fraud, which carries a cumulative maximum penalty of 1 million US Dollars in fines and 35 years in prison.
On January 11, 2013, at the age of 26, Swartz tragically ended his life in his Brooklyn apartment. His death sparked widespread outrage and debates about digital rights.
Tributes poured for him on social media today, as the world mourned Swartz’s untimely demise, remembering his life and activism and the overreach by the American government that claimed his life.
In a statement issued in remembrance of Swartz, ChintaBAR, an independent student collective from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras said, “His legacy continues to inspire the fight for a more open and equitable internet, where information is freely available to all.”
Open-access advocates, researchers, and academics now remember him as a hero and a martyr as a symbol of democratising knowledge. His feat even inspired the development of Sci-Hub, a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers by bypassing publishers' paywalls.
His life and activism even inspired two documentaries — The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz and Killswitch: The Battle to Control the Internet
