Advocate for Open Internet Access Commits Suicide [Update]

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Aaron Swartz (26) is dead

Aaron Swartz is the founder of Demand Progress. He previously co-founded the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, watchdog.net, Open Library, Jottit, and Reddit.com. He is co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification and helped launch Creative Commons.

Our Mission

• Demand Progress works to win progressive policy changes for ordinary people through organizing, and grassroots lobbying.  In particular, we tend to focus on issues of civil liberties, civil rights, and government reform.
• We run online campaigns to rally people to take action on the news that affects them — by contacting Congress and other leaders, funding pressure tactics, and spreading the word in their own communities.
• We work in Washington to provide an advocate for the public in all the back-room decisions that affect our lives.

Biography Aaron Swartz

Friends, Colleagues Mourn Web Pioneer Aaron Swartz, Key Architect of Creative Commons

Aaron Swartz–a pioneer of key social networking technologies, champion of internet freedoms and credited with playing a major role in bringing Creative Commons to the internet–has committed suicide at the age of 26, a lawyer for his family has confirmed.

“There is no way to express the sadness of this day,” said friend, mentor, and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig. “There will be many words, eventually, to express its anger. This story will infuriate you. For now, to the co-creator of RSS, of the Creative Commons architecture, of part of Reddit, and of endless love and inspiration and friendships, rest. We are all incredibly sorry to have let you down.”

• Feds add 9 felony charges to activist for rogue downloading of academic articles – (JSTOR)

{Update}Tech World Saddened by Death of Internet Activist Aaron Swartz

(Atlantic Wire) – Swartz will also possibly be remembered for breaking into MIT and downloading nearly five million documents from online archive JSTOR in order to distribute them more freely. He was charged by prosecutors in Massachusetts even after MIT and JSTOR elected not to continue with the case.

Doctorow addresses speculation that some of Swartz’s legal troubles may have led him to take the action he did, but there’s also this touching passage about the helplessness of those close to people suffering from depression:

I don’t know if it’s productive to speculate about that, but here’s a thing that I do wonder about this morning, and that I hope you’ll think about, too. I don’t know for sure whether Aaron understood that any of us, any of his friends, would have taken a call from him at any hour of the day or night. I don’t know if he understood that wherever he was, there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.

We challenge you to read the whole thing and finish dry-eyed.