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| Aaron Swartz |
A co-founder of the social news website Reddit and
activist who fought to make online content free to the public has been
found dead, authorities have confirmed, prompting an outpouring of grief
from prominent voices on the intersection of free speech and the Web.
Aaron
Swartz, 26, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment weeks before he
was to go on trial on accusations that he stole millions of journal
articles from an electronic archive in an attempt to make them freely
available.
He was pronounced dead on Friday evening
at his home in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, said Ellen
Borakove, spokeswoman for New York’s chief medical examiner.
Swartz
was a prodigy who as a young teenager helped create RSS, a family of
Web feed formats used to gather updates from blogs, news headlines,
audio and video for users.
He later co-founded
Reddit, which ended up being sold to Conde Nast, as well as the
political action group Demand Progress, which campaigns against Internet
censorship.
In 2011, he was arrested in Boston and
charged with stealing millions of articles from a computer archive at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Prosecutors said he broke
into a computer wiring closet on campus and used his laptop for the
downloads.
Swartz pleaded not guilty to charges including wire fraud.
His federal trial was to begin next month. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a fortune in fines.
Some
legal experts considered the case unfounded, saying that MIT allows
guests access to the articles and Swartz, a fellow at Harvard’s Safra
Center for Ethics, was a guest.
According to a
federal indictment, Swartz stole the documents from JSTOR, a
subscription service used by MIT that offers digitized copies of
articles from academic journals.
Prosecutors said he intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites.
He
faced 13 felony charges, including breaching site terms and intending
to share downloaded files through peer-to-peer networks, computer fraud,
wire fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and
criminal forfeiture.
JSTOR did not press charges once it reclaimed the articles from Swartz.